What to do about Apple’s shameful Mac security flaw in macOS High Sierra
“Someone at Apple seriously dropped the ball and put an unforgivable security flaw inside macOS High Sierra,” Jonny Evans writes for Computerworld.
“Complacency and incompetence are the biggest computer security threats, and Apple’s latest Mac security flaw seems to combine both of these,” Evans writes. “The flaw means anyone with physical access to your Mac can get inside the machine and tinker with it.”
Evans writes, “The problem (which first got disclosed here) was first revealed in a Tweet by Lemi Orhan Ergin.
Dear @AppleSupport, we noticed a *HUGE* security issue at MacOS High Sierra. Anyone can login as "root" with empty password after clicking on login button several times. Are you aware of it @Apple?
“This is a monumental error,” Evans writes. “It also seems completely avoidable – it’s not as if every hacker anywhere doesn’t use the word ‘root’ in an attempt to penetrate security. The only way Apple’s engineers might have improved on this (i.e. made it worse) is if they had used the password ‘123456.’ The existence of the problem is shameful. Why does it exist and who is responsible?”
Imagine a locked door, but if you just keep trying the handle, it says "oh well" and lets you in without a key. https://t.co/KBW4qntMdA
Read more, and how to fix this shameful security flaw, in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Tim Cook’s Apple. That’s where the buck stops, right after it flits across Craig Federighi’s desk in this case, in a properly-run enterprise.
“Oh, but Apple’s basically printing money,” some cry! “Look at the share price; it’s near an all-time high!”
The quality has been slipping for years and the mistakes, bad designs, stupid decisions, product delays and worse have been piling up. Exactly, how do you so thoroughly fsck up your top-of-the-line Macintosh by “designing yourself into a thermal corner” while trying to prove that you can “still innovate, your ass” (and failing abysmally) and not be able to deliver a replacement for going on FOUR YEARS?! Even HP and/or Dell could do it in 4 weeks. ASUS could do it on 4 days. If anyone needs a stronger indication of the existence of a problem at Apple that stems from the very top, they’re batshit delusional.
So, when you produce a $300 coffee table book with 450 painstakingly shot photographs on “specially milled German paper with gilded matte silver edges, using eight color separations and low-ghost inks” and even trumpet that it “took more than eight years to create,” but you can’t make or even bother to update the Mac Pro for over four years… Hey, you deserve every single bit of criticism and then some, if not for your horribly misplaced priorities and blatantly obvious mismanagement, then for your abject tone-deafness alone.
In other words, doing your real job first grants you the ability to screw around on some vanity projects without criticism. — MacDailyNews, May 18, 2017
This lack of focus, lack of attention to detail, lack of striving for perfection will catch up to Apple eventually if it is not arrested and corrected in time.
So – sigh – we once again present to Apple CEO Tim Cook, where the buck supposedly stops, the Trophy for Misplaced Priorities: The Misplaced Priorities Trophy
Luckily for Tim Cook, Steve Jobs left him a perpetual profit machine that can absorb pretty much any lackadaisical fsckatude that can be thrown into the spokes. — MacDailyNews, November 17, 2017
