In 2021, Apple paid a student $100,000 after he discovered a dangerous vulnerability relating to Macs and reported it to Apple. The Guardian reported that Apple confirmed “All Mac systems and iOS devices are affected, but there are no known exploits impacting customers at this time.” The risk was mitigated by updates to the operating system which closed off the areas that were exposed. Having had no response from Apple within 90 days he went public with details of the vulnerability.īack in 2018, the news was filled with stories about the Meltdown and Spectre flaws that attacked vulnerabilities in Intel and ARM processors. Such vulnerabilities, though rare, could allow an attacker root access to your Mac.Īpple is usually quick to fix, but there have been cases where Apple has been criticised for being slow to respond to the threat once it’s been identified.įor example, in 2019 researcher Filippo Cavallarin found a Gatekeeper vulnerability that he alerted Apple to. When these are identified by security researchers (or friendly hackers) they usually alert Apple to them in the hope that the company will quickly close the vulnerability, quickly – or within zero days – before it is exploited. These vulnerabilities are sometimes referred to as back doors or as a zero day vulnerability. However, from time to time security vulnerabilities are detected that could be used by hackers to exploit Macs.

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