Quick Security fix for OS X Remote Desktop Agent

As of last week a security issue has been raised regarding Apple Remote Desktop Agent and escalation of user privileges to root (super user) without authentication. To see if your machine is affected you can run the following terminal command.

osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "whoami"';
If the above command displays "root" then your OS suffers from the above mentioned problem. To patch this vulnerability issue the command below.

sudo chmod 0555 /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAgent

Here chmod (change file modes utility) changes the file mode bits for a file in this case ARDAgent.
It turns off the "set user Id on execution bit" which would be the file owner in this case root. Note the mode of 5 = read(4)+execute(1) is set for owner, group and all others.

So using a chmod of 4555 on the ARDAgent would see the problem reappear, only if this is run again by root.

All for now.