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Apple is not renowned for publishing clear end-of-support announcements for their products.

In our network (a big university) we have strict policies and we do not allow unpatched systems. We were able to "forbid" Windows XP machines after Microsoft announced its end of support.

We would now like to do the same for OS X 10.6.

According to Wikipedia

Unsupported as of February 25, 2014, though the last security update happened in September 2013 and an update to the Mac App Store on Snow Leopard was made in January 2016.

Sadly, Apple made a minor non-security update to the system in January 2016 because of the Apple Store giving the impression that the system is not dead.

Are there any known exploits for 10.6 that would allow me to show our community that the system indeed is not secure?

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  • Related but without a definitive answer.
    – techraf
    Commented Apr 14, 2016 at 9:35
  • @techraf Yes and the answer depicts the problem. There is nothing official. In the case an unmatched exploit exists, it would be a "proof" that the system is not OK
    – Matteo
    Commented Apr 14, 2016 at 9:37
  • @techraf OS X 10.6.8 is from 2011 (support.apple.com/kb/DL1400?locale=en_US) on September 30 2015 Apple is announcing that you should upgrade to 10.11 (El Capitan). But is not an update of 10.6, is a strong suggestion to switch to 10.11
    – Matteo
    Commented Apr 14, 2016 at 14:42
  • Apple don't seem to formally declare an end of support for their OSes, so in a sense you get to decide when you stop allowing it. You're not being unreasonable in refusing to allow an OS that hasn't seen a security patch in three years!
    – Graham Hill
    Commented Apr 14, 2016 at 15:28

1 Answer 1

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There have been several really big issues like heartbleed (probably only relevant to servers). Try to find some and see what you can do.

Then there is Safari. If users are smart, they install Chrome or Firefox to get updates. But Chrome doesn't support 10.6 anymore.

Anyway, if users use Safari, they are not safe. Think of TLS problems with old certificates.

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  • I didn't down vote but: OS X is not Linux: no glibc.
    – Matteo
    Commented Apr 14, 2016 at 15:25

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