New MacBook Air & Pro Hack Discovered; It Uses the Battery Password

Tweet

While Apple’s computers, whether laptops or desktops, offer better protection against viruses, malware attempts and various hacks than regular Windows-based machine, they’re not completely problem-free. Charlie Miller, a security researcher, has found an important new hack that can affect current MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and MacBook models.

What seems to be the problem you ask? Well it looks like the batteries of Apple’s laptops can be hacked as we’re looking at simple passwords that protect the chips of these batteries. Once that “protection” has been beat, a hacker could then harm your computer, both physically and “mentally.” In other words a skilled hacker could take advantage of this security issue, and either plant malware on your computer, which you’ll have a very tough time to uninstall considering that you won’t know how you got infected in the first place, or attempt to make your computer catch on fire due by trying to convince the battery to overheat. The batteries can be bricked too, but that would probably be the best-case scenario in case you’d ever get affected by a hacker like that.

All that is apparently available after simply hacking the battery chipset, which is quite interesting and troublesome at the same time. Miller will further explain his findings at Black Hat next month and he will also offer a fix, a software called “Caulkgun” that would change the default passwords to something more secure. The same software would however prevent Apple from issuing firmware updates for the battery chip, as the company won’t have access to the battery chip, so you may not necessarily want to go down that route.

Naturally, we expect Apple to issue its own fix for the matter, as the company has been notified by Miller and it will probably act soon considering the potential consequences of such battery hacks. Of course, while Miller has found these password issues, it doesn’t mean that a hacker near you is trying to take advantage of it as we speak. Or does it?