Posted on 06/13/2007 2:05:03 PM PDT by PajamaTruthMafia
And when we have as many people driving saabs as yugos they will be just as safe in a crash...
I agree with you regarding the overwhelming availability of MS vs Mac for targeting. Sure it’s more difficult to attack Macs, but not impossible. One day a very good hacker is going to write some scripts and tools for use against the Mac, and when it happens there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth by all those Mac users who didn’t practice ANY kind of computer security because they felt safe.
No matter the platform, OS, or other security provided by your network, ALWAYS distrust unknown/unverified information be it an email or a website or anything else.
That is all I’ve been saying....
” Maynor has a personal beef with Apple since his hyped-up OS X wi-fi exploit turned out not to be and he was humiliated in the community. He was unable to put up or shut up.”
That’s the apple fanboy take. Apple patching the holes he described months later validated him.
Maynor is one of the best vulnerability researchers out there. Sure he has a beef with Apple - they lied about what he found.
The same happened to me in the past - I found a serious remote vulnerability in VERY popular browser plugin that allowed an attacker to take full control of the desktop PC. The vendor refused to admit it or fix it. I released it to Bugtraq. Then they lied to CNET reporters about the impact, silently patched it, and never notified their customers to update. This was back in 99. It happens!
No, that's the truth. While Maynor knew it was a general platform-agnostic issue, he portrayed it as a problem with Apple and used a third-party wireless card in order to do the exploit. Admittedly, Apple's response was overblown too. They could have handled it better. But Maynor, while being very talented, didn't handle it well either.
Apple later fixed some bugs in wireless, including relating to -- oh my gosh -- third-party wireless drivers. That Apple didn't give any credit is strange, as giving credit is the usual practice.
Does Firefox out of the box, so to speak, not connect automatically to the BBC through “live bookmark”?...
I don't recall. In fact, Firefox has occasionally tried to connect to the net at start-up, but most of the time, it doesn't. But check my post #53 on this thread: I was able to get Safari to stop trying to connect on start-up by telling it to never check for RSS feeds. The "Never" option should be the default, in my view.
No, it isn't and it doesn't.
Maynor's and Ellch's third party card/driver exploit allowed them to get into an administrator level account which had a root enabled terminal already activated and modify a file. They already knew the user name and password for the invaded account. The MacBook had been pre-loaded with a script and prepared for their access which demotes this "exploit" to a local trust issue in that a local user HAD to have access prior to the remote exploit to set up the target computer. Given that they had to install the USB WiFi card, install the third party drivers (ignoring the already factory installed card and drivers from Apple), and install their scripts, it is impossible to know what other modifications they made to the MacBook including opening ports that are normally closed on a default Mac. What they demonstrated was a failing of a card/driver combination that would never have been used on a Mac in an artificial environment.
What Apple found and patched were errors in the drivers supplied by their card/driver supplier which uses an entirely different chip set than the card Maynor and Ellch used in their hoax. The glitches Apple found in their drivers were Denial of Service crashes of the network due to buffer overflows in a non-executable buffer. In other words, WiFi crashed and there was no longer any connection to the computer. These DoS vulnerabilities would not have allowed remote user access such as the exploit Maynor and Ellch showed.
Maynor and Ellch claimed, but never demonstrated, that their exploit would also work with the factory supplied and installed Apple AirPort card and drivers. There explanation for using an external USB WiFi card third party drivers was that Apple had "leaned on them to not use a Mac laptop to demonstrate this general vulnerability that would hit PCs as well" and that the external card and non-Apple drivers were their compromise to please Apple. Right. Sure. Obviously it didn't please Apple.
When challenged to duplicate their stunt under controlled conditions on an out of the box, brand new MacBook, neither Maynor nor Ellch were willing to do so, even though, had they done so, they could have walked away with a brand new MacBook. That challenge is still open. If they could do it with the vulnerabilities Apple reported, they could still have the MacBook.
As for not giving credit when credit is due for reporting Apple security flaws, if you go back through Apple's security updates you will find they have never failed to credit the people who found and reported the issues.
Since Maynor and Ellch did NOT provide Apple with any evidence, ignored the well established routine for reporting security issues to any publisher/manufacturer, and went instead for the hype (". . . stick a lit cigarette in Mac users' eyes. . ."), the only credit Maynor and Ellch are due is that their stunt caused Apple to do a top to bottom security audit of their default Wifi looking for the claimed vulnerability. They did not find what Maynor and Ellch claimed was possible... but they did find and patch some potentially irksome, unexploited vulnerabilities in their drivers.
SecureWorks, the company Maynor worked for, found it necessary, when Maynor could not produce evidence of his prior notification to Apple of his findings OR of Maynor's and Ellch's claim that Apple had LEANED on them to not use a MacBook's native card and drivers, to issue a disclaimer. Maynor shortly thereafter found himself at liberty to start his own security company because he no longer worked for his previous employer. Is it just coincidence that Maynor chose to leave his job just weeks after this scandal broke? I think not.
See my previous post above.
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