"When you used the "shift-option-command-R did you have to wipe your hard drive first or could you just use it like when you upgrade?"
Actually, I did it differently -- IF I'm recalling this right.
I DO NOT USE time machine -- I use ONLY CarbonCopyCloner for my backups.
I had a CCC cloned backup of my boot partition that HAD NOT been upgraded with the faulty "security update", so...
I did this instead:
1. Booted from my cloned backup
2. ERASE the boot partition with Disk Utility
3. RE-cloned from my backup BACK TO the boot partition
That was it.
It worked.
No more crashes/reboots when I was away.
One other thing:
For some reason, when I first start up in the morning, I sometimes get the notification "your Mac was restarted due to an error" (or something like that).
However, it never crashed.
I'm thinking that the error msg is being produced by something that happens in the shutdown procedure that might not be getting done right.
Doesn't happen all the time, just once in a while.