So much for Apple security

Post by **Patrick** » Mon Mar 06, 2006 8:08 am

Mac-mini hacked in under 30 minutes:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/s ... 748,00.htm

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Mon Mar 06, 2006 8:27 am

Well, it's a well known fact that Apple hasn't fixed old UNIX flaws that was fixed years ago in Linux and *BSD, so this doesn't surprise me.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Mon Mar 06, 2006 10:09 am

0-day or weak password? You decide!

I'm not at all convinced - I'd never clam the mac is the king of security, but that article at least provided no info at all about what was running on the box or how the hacker gained root. My guess is that the box either had weak passwords and ssh/telnet turned on, or was running unpatched php or something. If macs were that easy to pwn (via unpublished vulnerabilities that you can't stop because they're unpublished, which means that you can't stop them, but I know cuz I'm 1337...LOLOLOLOL..snort...), they'd be owned all the time - spammers do not give a fsck whether they're bombing the world with spam from a mac or spam from a windows machine. Large vector or not, easy pickings would be getting picked off regularly.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Tue Mar 07, 2006 10:01 am

As I figured, this wasn't what it appeared to be. The guy was giving shells away on the box, so at best, what we have here is priv escalation. Not pwnage. Furthermore, the box wasn't actually owned as far as I can tell. A webpage running on it was defaced, but the 1337 script kiddie who "owned" the box via "So0p3r 53|<r3t AND UNPUBLISHED AND UNPATCHED FLAWS" did not, in fact, gain root. Nor did he rm -rf /. Again, while I'm not a major apple fanboy, this article contained half-baked reporting at best, outright misinformation at worst.