Apple Inc. issued patches for 17 vulnerabilities in Mac OS X yesterday, including one meant to fix a critical bug in the Internet’s traffic cop, the Domain Name System (DNS).

The DNS patch didn’t patch anything, at least on the client side according to researchers.

It’s back to the drawing board for Apple. I am sure a lot of PC users are chuckling at their counterpart about the latest problems with the Mac OS X. It’s time for that PC versus Mac commercial to take revenge on Mac.

“The difficult news this morning is that we thought we were getting a patch, but we haven’t gotten anything,” said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security Inc.

Storms’ tests confirmed that even after Apple’s update was applied, systems running the client version of Mac OS X were still incrementing ports, not randomizing them, as should have been the case if the fix had addressed the flaw.

That’s not good. Last week, after speculation about the DNS vulnerability essentially confirmed its technical details, exploit code appeared. This week, attacks began against unpatched DNS servers, with at least one confirmed case reported.