If Apple Can’t Get the Basics Right, How Can you Expect Security? — “We Hacked Apple for 3 Months: Here’s What We Found”

Apple cannot get the basics right.

Apple T2 Chip: Unfixable Security Flaw that Gives Attacker Full Control

But security is among the most difficult challenges of software development—far more difficult than ordinary features.

We Hacked Apple for 3 Months: Here’s What We Found

Between the period of July 6th to October 6th myself, Brett Buerhaus, Ben Sadeghipour, Samuel Erb, and Tanner Barnes worked together and hacked on the Apple bug bounty program.

• Sam Curry (@samwcyo)
• Brett Buerhaus (@bbuerhaus)
• Ben Sadeghipour (@nahamsec)
• Samuel Erb (@erbbysam)
• Tanner Barnes (@_StaticFlow_)

During our engagement, we found a variety of vulnerabilities in core portions of their infrastructure that would've allowed an attacker to fully compromise both customer and employee applications, launch a worm capable of automatically taking over a victim's iCloud account, retrieve source code for internal Apple projects, fully compromise an industrial control warehouse software used by Apple, and take over the sessions of Apple employees with the capability of accessing management tools and sensitive resources.

There were a total of 55 vulnerabilities discovered with 11 critical severity, 29 high severity, 13 medium severity, and 2 low severity reports. These severities were assessed by us for summarization purposes and are dependent on a mix of CVSS and our understanding of the business related impact.

As of October 6th, 2020, the vast majority of these findings have been fixed and credited. They were typically remediated within 1-2 business days (with some being fixed in as little as 4-6 hours).

MPG: should give anyone pause. Then consider state actors.