If you own one of the fancy new 802.11n AirPort Extreme base stations, you may want to fire up Software Update.

Apple just released a security update that fixes a vulnerability in the hub. If it were to be exploited, the flaw could allow an attacker to slow performance down to a trickle.

29 Aug 2007

According to Apple, the flaw exists in the way the Airport Extreme handles a certain type of routing headers in the IPv6 networking protocol.

If an attacker were to send a specially crafted data packet to base station, the amount of available bandwidth could be reduced and networking speed would be slowed down. Not exactly a doomsday scenario, but if for some reason you had a mischievous associate or neighbor that for some strange reason wanted to slow down your Airport network, this may be of use, I guess.

If you have a gigabit-equipped base station, you can skip this one. That model is not affected.