Apple has released its first patches of 2010 and if you are running Snow Leopard I recommend you apply the patches. Apple users have the distinct advantage of Windows users of predominantly being ignored. Despite the fact that playing a malformed audio file can cause arbitrary code execution (which means your Mac is vulnerable to malicious code), not too many people are interested in exploiting the vulnerability.

A lot of hardcore Mac fans point out that there are no viruses for Snow Leopard. Viruses are less than 5% of the malicious threats we see in the Windows world. There is malware that runs on Snow Leopard, it just doesn’t self-replicate. An important thing for businesses to remember is that a hacker who wants to target an individual business can exploit vulnerabilities. It really isn’t about viruses, keeping your system up to date is a good security practice no matter what operating system you use.

You can find out the security details of this update at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4004. Normally configured OS X systems will update automatically. If you have disabled the automatic update feature then be sure to go get the updates.
 
Randy Abrams
Director of Technical Education