I always heard about how Macs are so much better than PCs because you never hear about viruses or hacks on MACs. Well apparently those people were wrong. Did you know that the new Apple MacBooks can be hacked via the battery of all things? [source: the hacker news]
Security researcher Charlie Miller is quite well known for his works on Apple products. Today he has come up with a very interesting way to hack the MacBook using the battery. Laptop battery contains its own monitoring circuit which reports the status of the battery to the OS. It also ensure that the battery does not overcharge even when the laptop is turned off.
Miller has discovered that on the MacBooks, the batteries are shipped with the default password set on the chips. It means that if someone knows the default password, the firmware of the battery can be controlled to do many things from simply ruining the battery to installing a malware which reinstalls whenever the OS boots. Miller said that it might even be possible to overload the battery so that it catches fire.
This is what Miller said: These batteries just aren’t designed with the idea that people will mess with them. What I’m showing is that it’s possible to use them to do something really bad.
You could put a whole hard drive in, reinstall the software, flash the BIOS, and every time it would reattack and screw you over. There would be no way to eradicate or detect it other than removing the battery.
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