Recent reports reveal that a flaw present in Apple’s Mac operating system for over 15 years, gives hackers the ability to gain full control over a user’s machine.
A hobby hacker (credit: WccfTech), took to Twitter to reveal a ‘ local privilege escalation vulnerability’ found in an extension of the macOS kernel – i.e. the core of the operating system.
As reported by Trusted Reviews a self-proclaimed ‘hobbyist hacker’ Siguza explained the issue more on Twitter:
“Needs to be running on the host already (nothing remote), achieves full system compromise by itself, but logs you out in the process. Can wait for logout though and is fast enough to run on shutdown/reboot until 10.13.1. On 10.13.2 it takes a fair bit longer (maybe half a minute) after logging out, so if your OS logs you out unexpectedly… maybe pull the plug?”.
Regardless of the severity, the issue affects all current versions of macOS, which has been present for over a decade.
Apple is reportedly working on a patch to fix the security breach quite quickly.
