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Hacker Publishes Notorious Apple Wi-Fi Attack
inkslinger77 writes "It's been about a year since David Maynor claimed to have found a way to take over a Mac using a flaw in a Wireless driver. He's now published his work for public scrutiny. Maynor had been under a nondisclosure agreement, which had previously prevented him from publishing details of the hack, but the NDA is over now and by going public with the information, Maynor hopes to help other Apple researchers with new documentation on things like Wi-Fi debugging and the Mac OS X kernel core dumping facility."
Come on, it looked pretty suspicious. He demonstrated a security hole, refused to detail it, it turns out he used a third-party WiFi card instead of the built-in card... Who would just accept that and say "well, it's a fair cop?"
Some Apple fans got a bit rabid. Not because a security flaw was found - there have been a good number of those since OS X started, and resposible disclosure has never caused users to go apeshit before - but because of the way the flaw was publicised without any real information. On top of that, he made that crack about stabbing Mac users in the eye with a pencil. What was that about? Who says these things and expects no reaction whatsoever?
Then he started saying he'd had death threats. Still haven't seen the threats and apparently they were serious enough to publicise but not enough to call the police in. I lost touch with the story when it seemed to be just poor reporting with low information content and pissy blog wars.
And now a secret NDA is up and he can talk about it. Well, good for him. It's about a year too late, but there's still publicity to be made I see.