Security researchers Dave Maynor of ISS and Johnny Cache -- a.k.a. Jon Ellch -- demonstrated an exploit that allowed them to install a rootkit on an Apple laptop in less than a minute. Well, sort of; they showed a video of it, and also noted that they'd used a third-party Wi-Fi card in the demo of the exploit, rather than the MacBook's internal Wi-Fi card. But they said that the exploit would work whether the third-party card -- which they declined to identify -- was inserted in a Mac, Windows, or Linux laptop.
How is that for murky and non-transparent? The whole world is at risk -- if the exploit is real -- whenever the unidentified card is used. But they won't say which card, although many sources presume the card is based on the Atheros chipset, which Apple employs.
It gets worse. Brian Krebs of the Washington Post, who first reported on the exploit, updated his original story and has reported that Maynor said, "Apple had leaned on Maynor and Ellch pretty hard not to make this an issue about the Mac drivers -- mainly because Apple had not fixed the problem yet."
