Keyboards Apple vulnerable to hacker attacks

Today, virtually every electronic device has a processor and a memory chip, even keyboards. Here and in the keyboard Apple - 8 KB of flash memory and 256 bytes of RAM. As it turned out, even such products from Apple can be attacked by hackers. For example, on information security conference Black Hat Researcher K. Chen (K. chen) demonstratedHow you can easily install keyloggers and malicious code to Apple keyboards.

Hack memory and RAM Apple keyboard is easy - it even helps utility HIDFirmwareUpdaterTool, which is usually used to update the firmware HID devices, including there is also the keyboard itself. To crack the keyboard enough to run the utility, set a breakpoint and paste the new code into the memory of the firmware image. The hacker does not even have anything to encrypt and decrypt. Once the utility HIDFirmwareUpdaterTool restarts, the keyboard can be considered compromised. Moreover, the user can not determine that the keyboard is something wrong. No rebooting or taking out the batteries to correct the situation will already be impossible.

At the conference itself Chan showed how a simple keyboard keylogger, which gives hacker last five characters entered by the user (only five because memory in the keyboard limited). And the spy can be installed even remotely - for example, with a hacked site.

This is actually a big problem with data security for users, so that Apple will need to quickly solve it, protect all their devices. Chen told Apple about the vulnerability of the keyboard, but the company did not react to his statement. He is able to create a utility to block the firmware, but first wants to Apple engineers have found a solution to the problem. Chen fears that the company will close a hole in a part of the operating system, although for completely blocking found it necessary to solve vulnerabilities in hardware or a complete processing firmware keyboard.

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