Apple Keyboard Hack Proved Possible

Slashdot reports that Apple keyboards are vulnerable to hackers’ attacks due to the complexity of their inner workings, which include RAM and flash memory. According to the report, the hack can potentially place keyloggers and malware directly into the device’s firmware.

To make matters even worse, the author of this “proof of concept” has also published the presentation and code in a PDF that’s free to download for anyone on the planet. The vuln is undoubtedly enticing to hackers, some of which are likely to create one or more exploits for the flaw in question. To better understand how this discovery has turned into a potential security issue, we offer you a few excerpts from the published document.

For ethical reasons, the firmware modification we describe is benign. The firmware is modified so that the LED under the CAP S LOC K key of the keyboard will flash momentarily when the keyboard is first plugged into a system. However, malicious payloads can be developed by individuals with mal-intent. Read more

Rooting Out Rootkits

We’ve spoken about Rootkits before, they’re nasty little pieces of malware that can open up your PC to hackers, but are also really difficult to detect and eliminate because they hide inside legitimate applications and files. McAfee, the antivirus people have come up with a new Rootkit removal tool, called Rootkit Detective. It’s still in its prerelease beta version but it seems stable enough and compared with other Rootkit removal tools we’ve tried, it’s blindingly fast. Although it didn’t find any infections on our office PCs it did flag up a few files, belonging to uninstalled applications, that shouldn’t be there, so it’s definitely worth a try, especially if you have any concerns about the security of your PC.

Hack a Laptop Challenge, Winners and Losers

In a three-day contest, held at a major security conference in Vancouver recently, teams of hackers were challenged to break their way into three laptops, running Mac OS X, Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux operating systems, reports CNet News.

Now I know what you are thinking but you’d be wrong… On the first day all three machines repulsed attacks on the operating systems and via a network connection. The Mac Air laptop was the first to fall, however, two minutes into the start of the second day’s session. This was after the judges relaxed the rules to allow the hackers to attack browser and email vulnerabilities. Read more