According to Sarah Edwards, a forensic analyst at the SANS Institute who specializes in reviewing computers for evidence of hacks the security flaw can let a hacker from far away forcing a Mac into a coma. Corporate, government and personal Macs could be spied on in a way that even the best security checks wouldn't discover. There could be weird stuff going on in the computer system without anyone know it until it's way too late.
According to the security expert, what makes this one so bad it's the computer bug running especially deep in the Apple Mac machine. All computers feature a basic input/output system (BIOS). This is the core program that brings a machine to life, according to Edwards. This is the kind of thing that should obviously remain heavily guarded and any user should never tamper with it should.
But apparently, Macs purchased one year ago or before, leave a door open. The moment when a Mac goes into sleep mode and wakes back up, a hacker could get direct access to the BIOS. It's a weird security flaw that lets someone tamper with the code there. That issue has been discovered recently by Pedro Vilaça, an independent computer security researcher in Portugal. He revealed in a blog post last Friday this vulnerability of older Mac computers. He declared in an interview for CNNMoney that he alerted Apple directly soon thereafter.
Apple would not say when it plans to release an update to fix the issue and did not respond to any questions about this flaw. Several cybersecurity experts also confirmed to CNNMoney that they plan to research further in the next weeks since this is a real problem.
According to security experts, this isn't an easy hack. An eventual attacker first needs to gain administrative access to a machine. However, this security flaw allows that a Mac gets hacked with a low-level computer virus that can bury so deep that is very difficult to find it.
The real problem here, according to experts, is that it gives hackers more time to plot a massive bank heist or a huge corporate takedown, like in the case of the Sony Pictures hack. High-value targets such as politicians, bankers, company executives, journalists, the wealthy or anyone else worth spying on for a long period of time are in a real danger.
Perhaps, the average Mac user doesn't have to worry about this one, because they're actually susceptible to easier and cheaper hacks, according to Katie Moussouris, an executive at HackerOne, an agency that helps organizations to fix dangerous computer bugs.
Tod Beardsley, a security research manager at cybersecurity firm Rapid7, also explained that most Mac users should not worry because they aren't likely to get hacked because of this bug.
According to reports, this is the second major flaw in Apple devices discovered over a short period of time. Recently, security experts discovered that an iPhone can be crashed by simply sending it a text message.
