Apple is having a tough time in security right now, with the Mac in particular being a lot of unwanted attention.
As you may recall, a bug that allowed root access to the operating system without the use of keywords was found earlier this week, with patches issued immediately that solved the problem for users of macos 10.13.0 and 10.13.1.
It's believed to be the end of it - a problem bar that then sees a shared drive failing after patching until the second patch is released - to this day, when security researchers are starting to warn that there are special use cases where root bugs potentially reappear. The case is when the user is still in macos 10.13.0 and then install the root patch. Again, that should be the end of the story, but some users report that if they later update to macos 10.13.1, the root bug reappears.
Worse, those who then re-apply root security fixes also report that the problem is not resolved until they restart - something that is not needed as part of the installation process and is not mentioned in its entirety.
And worse, two of those Mac users say they’ve also tried re-installing Apple’s security patch after that upgrade, only to find that the “root” problem still persists until they reboot their computer, with no warning that a reboot is necessary.
As reported by Wired, macos 10.13.1 itself still includes root security issues and it seems that Apple has not patched its own updates, meaning everyone who downloads it from Apple's servers effectively re-introduces the bug to their system. , even if it has been patched first. The fact that can happen is mind boggling, and something that really needs to be handled by Apple. At a time when so many people believe that Apple's software quality control is at an all-time low, especially for Macs, such a farce does not help Apple's reputation or the trust of its users.