Apple was warned about WireLurker months ago, Georgia Tech researcher says
L33tdawg: So what else is new?
The WireLurker malware that may have infected hundreds of thousands of Mac OS and iOS devices is exactly similar to a proof-of-concept attack Apple was warned about at the beginning of this year, according to the researcher who first publicly described such attacks.
The malware can siphon off data from iOS devices when they sync up with computers or are charged by computers via USB cables, but the potential for this type of attack can be much broader, says Tielei Wang, a researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology who presented a paper about such attacks at USENIX Security Symposium in August.
While WireLurker has targeted only Mac OS computers, similar attacks could come through computers running Windows and Linux operating systems, says Wang. He says he submitted his work to USENIX at the start of 2014 and had already notified Apple about the findings then.
