Breifings day2 Mac Drive-By

["Dude VanWinkle" <dudevanwinkle () gmail com>]

White Hat hackers have demonstrated how to use low-level hacking
exploits on wireless drivers to gain control of Apple MacBook PC.

A presentation by Jon Ellch and David Maynor at this week's Black Hat
security conference in Vegas omitted details of the security flaw. The
security researchers presented their demo by video to prevent
malicious hackers from sniffing network traffic and reconstructing
their attack.

Ellch and Maynor have found two similar flaws in the wireless device
drivers for Windows machines. The duo decided to present their demo
with a Mac machine as a target to prick what Maynor described as the
"Mac user base aura of smugness on security". During the demo, they
showed how they gained access to an Apple MacBook in less than a
minute, the Washington Post reports.

In all cases the attack only requires that a wireless device is
switched on. A user need not be connected to a wireless network for
the attack to succeed because drivers are commonly configured by
default to continuously seek out available wireless networks. Maynor
said that acute time pressures on driver developers contributed to the
underlying vulnerabilities exploited by the attack.

"The main problem here is that device drivers are a funny mix of stuff
put together by hardware and software developers, and these guys are
often under the gun to produce the code that will power products that
the manufacturer is often in a hurry to get to market," he said. (r)


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-JP
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