Apple always was this unbeatable company that managed to develop very resistant software which was highly resilient in front of all sorts of viruses. If you go Mac, you will never go back, because a Mac provides all the security and privacy a computer can offer. No security firewall lasts forever, seemingly, and this is what Apple is now facing.
Now, an improved attack on the firmware in Apple computers makes them highly vulnerable and hard to detect malware that acts aggressively without even being connected to a network, according to the latest Black Hat conference presentation that will offer further details on the matter later this week.
A new research highlights ongoing weaknesses in the low-level software which runs on all the computers long before an operating system is loaded.
The new virus comes from a team of researchers, namely Xeno Kovah and Corey Kallenberg. They embarked on a mission to sabotage the Mac software and show that its inner workings are not as unbeatable as thought. The experts showed sometime earlier this year how they can infect a Mac’s firmware with malware by connecting malicious devices using Thunderbolt, Apple’s high-speed data transfer interface. Researchers create viruses that infect Macs and they take things further by developing advancements and extensions which are able to further degrade the Mac software.
The team will soon unveil a virus called Thunderstrike 2, namely an attack that improves the former and strengthens its capacities as it can easily spread to other machines through removable peripherals. The strengthened attack uses a lot of vulnerabilities in the firmware used by Apple.
The attack can be used to touch computers that have been previously isolated for security reasons. With this new piece of research, experts have shown that Mac has exactly the same vulnerabilities as Windows Pc’s. The Apple myth has been broken by a highly advanced malware that can act to destroy and degrade all the inner workings of the extremely performant computer.
The worm was developed in such a way that the attack code can immediately unlock and rewrite the boot flash firmware. For other cases, it can easily take advantage of a problem whenever a computer is on standby or put to sleep while it resumes running. This problem has been deeply explored by another expert that tries to reveal the secrets and break the boundaries of Mac computers.
Infecting the computer with malware is a giant breakthrough when it comes to Apple computers but eliminating it is another important thing. The only way to eliminate the virus embedded in a computer’s firmware is to re-flash the chip that contains the firmware.
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