Apple has issued fixes for more than 47 security bugs in the Mac, iPhone and QuickTime media player, some that allowed attackers to take complete control of the underlying device.

The patches, which were released over a 24-hour period starting Wednesday, fix critical vulnerabilities in a variety software made both by Apple and third parties. OS X components included Alias Manager, CarbonCore, ClamAV, ColorSync, and CoreGraphics and Adobe Flash. The updates were available for both the Tiger and Leopard versions of the OS.

An update for the iPhone patched holes in CoreAudio, WebKit and MobileMail, among other things. A third update fixed four vulnerabilities in QuickTime, some of which allowed attackers to hijack a machine by tricking users into opening specially manipulated H.264 and MPEG-4 files.

For the most part, Snow Leopard, Apple's latest and greatest version of Mac OS X, was left out of the security patch love. It received a single fix that updated Flash to the latest, most secure, version. As previously reported, the new OS shipped with a version of the media player that left users susceptible to attack.

Snow Leopard was also updated to fix a host of non-security issues, including a vexing problem that prevented some users from being able to use the Mac's automatic feature for adding printers.

Apple advisories are available:

here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3865
here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3864
here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3859
and
here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3860

(Register)