The IT Nerd

Wired Magazine is reporting on a new threat for Mac users everywhere. Leveraging the “Thunderstrike” exploits uncovered earlier this year, “Thunderstrike 2,” infects Macs at the firmware level, making it nearly impossible to remove. This rather dangerous malware is resistant to firmware and software updates, able to block them entirely or reinstall itself at will.

Here’s a video that shows this threat in action:

Unlike Thunderstrike, this exploit is able to infect a Mac remotely through a malicious website or email. Once on a Mac, it’s able to spread itself to other Macs by hiding in the option ROM of peripheral devices like Apple’s own Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet adapter, external SSDs, RAID controllers, and more. Once infected by a Mac that has the Thunderstrike 2 worm, the peripheral would go on to infect any other Mac it connects to.

That’s pretty scary. And it shows that Apple hasn’t done nearly enough to protect their users from this sort of threat. They seriously need to step up their game and they need to do it now.

This entry was posted on August 3, 2015 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple, Hacked. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.