A security researcher has discovered a new Mac vulnerability that can seriously affect some Mac owners, even though most users should be relatively safe because the security flaw apparently isn’t used on a wide scale yet.
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According to Ars Technica, Pedro Vilaca discovered a OS X bug that would let a hacker take control of a Mac after it wakes up from sleep, and the security issue affects all Macs that were purchased before the mid-2014.
At this time, malicious hackers aren’t using the described method for mass attacks, but the research points out that certain high-level individuals who own Macs might be targeted with attacks that utilize this flaw.
Vilaca managed to reflash the BIOS of a Mac once it wakes up from sleep. Normally, something like this shouldn’t be possible, but it looks like an Apple oversight allows a hacker to reflash the Mac with malware that would survive hard drive reformatting and reinstallation.
The target wouldn’t even realize anything is happening while the malware is being written to the computer’s BIOS.
