Mac Wi-Fi hijack demonstrated

19 years ago

“Is the book on the Mac Wi-Fi hijack saga finally being closed? David Maynor, chief technology officer at Errata Security, at the Black Hat DC event here on Wednesday broke the months-long silence on a controversial Mac hack. He also said he plans to publicly release computer code used in that attack,” Joris Evers blogs for CNET.

“Maynor did offer an apology,” Evers writes. “‘I screwed up a little bit,’ he said. There was a lot of confusion around the Mac hack because the original presentation used a third party Wi-Fi card. However, Maynor and Ellch had in fact also found flaws in Apple’s own hardware, he said.”

Evers writes, “Maynor demonstrated a Mac Wi-Fi hack on stage on Wednesday. His MacBook running Mac OS X 10.4.6 crashed while scanning for a wireless network and coming across rogue code Maynor was pushing out from a Toshiba laptop. While the attack he demonstrated only caused a crash, it could also be used to run code on the Mac, he said.”

“Apple fixed that particular problem in September with Mac OS X 10.4.8, Maynor said,” Evers writes. “‘I did provide the information on vulnerabilities in Apple products, I provided them with code and they were given packet captures,’ he said. In the future, Maynor said he won’t work with Apple. ‘I do not feel comfortable keeping relations with the company and will not report future findings to them,’ he said.”

Full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “oh my” for the heads up.]
Whatever. The only thing demonstrated was a crash to an old, unfixed Mac OS X version. How about demonstrating an actual hijack? Thought so. This whole fiasco would make us want to stab Maynor in the eye with a lit cigarette or something, if only we cared one iota. And Maynor is a little baby. Apple will survive without Maynor’s dubious reports of future findings.