Apple's Gatekeeper Still Broken (csoonline.com)

itwbennett writes: This weekend, Apple security expert Patrick Wardle will detail a vulnerability in Apple's Gatekeeper that makes it possible to bypass the anti-malware defense. This is the same vulnerability that was disclosed last April, which Apple said it patched later. Wardle was able to easily bypass Apple's fixes. He says "all Apple did was blacklist the signed apps he was abusing, but didn't fix the underlying issue, which is that, essentially, Gatekeeper functions as a guard that doesn't check" software already on the whitelist.

Comments

Doesn't matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

People will still flock to Apple and buy the shit out of it. And Apple knows it.

Re:Doesn't matter.

[The-Ixian]

Yeah no kidding.

I don't personally like Apple the company. I just think they are too much about marketing hype. I was also not a fan of Steve Jobs personally.

But I still will recommend a Mac to someone when appropriate.

Computers and operating systems are tools not ideologies. Use the best tool for the job.

I won't be buying Apple products any time soon, but that is because there are tools out there that work better for me.

Re:Doesn't matter.

[ComputerGeek01]

Windows? Which is taking away control of your computer and sending analytics to the mother ship whether you agree or not?

As opposed to Apple where you never had any control over any of their devices to begin with? Apple IS the worst of all possibilities; they are overpriced, have ZERO support options outside of the "Mac Geniuses", nothing is documented and there is no ability to customize their software or tweak the system performance. You might be as happy as a pig in shit with a device that just does one thing adequately right out of the box and is useless for anything else, but this is a site for engineers; not social runoff that thinks it's too smart for Facebook.

Re:Doesn't matter.

[Guy Harris]

iOS runs UNIX and you have absolutely no control over it.

OS X is officially a UNIX but as of the latest version you can't even use root to replace some of Apple's software with newer versions.

If you're referring to System Integrity Protection, then, if you want to replace some of Apple's software, feel free to disable System Integrity Protection. A bit of a painful process, but the setting persists, so you only have to do it once, unless you want to turn it back on once you're done and then turn it off again when you want to change one of the protected files.

(Pro tip for people running OS X under VMware Fusion: if you're going to be doing this, you'll probably want to increase the boot delay on your VM so that you have enough time to do the "boot to Recovery OS" dance. The Parallels folk don't require anything like that, apparently, but I haven't tried it with Parallels.)

Lack of interest based security

[Flavianoep]

I've got the impression that security of MacOS relies strongly on the low market share and supposed lack of interest of the potential crackers. Am I too wrong?

Re:Lack of interest based security

[dgatwood]

In any mode, you can run an unsigned or non-Apple-signed installer or app by control-clicking on it and choosing "Open".

It does when they buy it for work

[Sycraft-fu]

The reason I'm very anti-Apple is particularly our younger professors decide that they need to have apple computers, phones, and tablets to be hip. So they get them, against recommendations. Now never mind that these cost a lot more money than they'd spend on equivalent hardware but then the support issues start. Turns out that Mac don't just magically work, and they have problems with things (accessing the central storage is something Macs have been particularly problematic with) and they whine to us despite promising that they understand and will support things themselves.

Apple wants to pretend to be good for the enterprise, but their enterprise features are garbage. So people get them, want them to integrate, they don't, and then they cry about it.