Apple Macbooks Can Be Hacked Through The Battery

[george]

Security researcher Charlie Miller is quite well known for his works on Apple products. Today he has come up with a very interesting way to hack the MacBook using the battery.

Laptop battery contains its own monitoring circuit which reports the status of the battery to the OS. It also ensure that the battery does not overcharge even when the laptop is turned off.

Full story: http://digitizor.com/2011/07/23/macbook-hacked-battery/

[RKeith]

Thanks for the article. Moral of the story: Beware of 3rd party cheap batteries.

[nidge]

I look forward to a security update from apple in the very near future.

[nullx8]

wooooo help someone can flash my battery ..

what a crap!!

dont tell that the US Customs, they may grap your macbook because its explosive HAHA.

hey newsflash: if you take out the harddisc and put in another pc you may able to erase it too

and there is no password !

same for system bios which you can reflash without any password as well (if you have root acces to the console)

make the storry short "i can kill your mac with just one (1) command on a root-shell.

just like every bsd or unixbased system.

there will be no security update for this sure.

[nikster]

Certainly a really interesting attack!

It's not really clear from the article whether or not one needs physical access to the machine in order to mess with the battery. But considering that Miller found the exploit in 2008 software updates, my guess is not! So that means you could hide a virus on the battery - kinda nasty!

Now, if Charlie Miller can find a workaround, so can Apple, so chances are they will actually fix this.

Edited July 27, 2011 by nikster