Q: Snow Leopard users: Turn off automatic date and time in System Preferences immediately
When exploited, the NTP flaw can cause buffer overflows that allow remote attackers to execute code on your system.
What this means is that, if you allow date and time to be set automatically by outside servers, you risk having your computer taken over.
This is a critical issue, it's being exploited as we speak, and Apple has not provided the update to Snow Leopard users, only to 10.8/Mountain Lion and above. I strongly doubt Apple will ever get around to issuing an update for Snow Leopard, or they would have already. Chances of that happening are close to zero
Posted on Dec 23, 2014 4:37 PM
To me 10.6.8 is still the best OS X Apple ever released and I patched my system just like the shellshock back in September. It's really easy if you have some basic shell skills and XCODE installed,
Here is what I did, it may save you some time:
open the terminal app
1) Download the source code, apply the patch (I got the source code links from the ntp site)
cd ~
mkdir ntpd-fix
cd ntpd-fix
curl http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~ntp/ntp_spool/ntp4/ntp-4.2/ntp-4.2.8.tar.gz | tar zxf -
2) Patch and compile the ntp source code
cd ntp-4.2.8/ntpd
curl http://bugs.ntp.org/attachment.cgi?id=1165 | patch -p1
cd ..
./configure && make
3) Open the system preferences - Date & Time - uncheck Set date and time automatically (to stop the process)
4) Rename the old object and then replace/copy them with the new objects
cd /usr/bin
sudo mv sntp sntp.old
sudo mv ntpq ntpq.old
sudo mv ntp-keygen ntp-keygen.old
cd /usr/sbin
sudo mv ntpdc ntpdc.old
sudo mv ntpdate ntpdate.old
sudo mv ntpd ntpd.old
cd ~/ntpd-fix/ntp-4.2.8
sudo cp sntp/sntp /usr/bin
sudo cp util/ntp-keygen /usr/bin
sudo cp ntpq/ntpq /usr/bin
sudo cp ntpdc/ntpdc /usr/sbin
sudo cp ntpdate/ntpdate /usr/sbin
sudo cp ntpd/ntpd /usr/sbin
sudo chown root:wheel /usr/bin/sntp
sudo chown root:wheel /usr/bin/ntp-keygen
sudo chown root:wheel /usr/bin/ntpq
sudo chown root:wheel /usr/sbin/ntpdc
sudo chown root:wheel /usr/sbin/ntpdate
sudo chown root:wheel /usr/sbin/ntpd
5) Open the system preferences - Date & Time - uncheck Set date and time automatically (to start the process)
6) Done.
-- update time manually
sudo ntpdate -u time.apple.com
-- check ntpd version (should now be: ntpd 4.2.8@1.3265-o)
sudo ntpd --version
Posted on Dec 24, 2014 12:12 PM
