Some Apple laptops shipped with Intel chips in "manufacturing mode"
Credit:
Wikipedia
L33tdawg: See this attack in action at HITBSecConf2018 - Dubai.
Apple has secretly fixed a security issue affecting some laptops that shipped with Intel chips that were mistakenly left configured into "manufacturing mode."
The OS maker fixed the issue in June, with the release of macOS High Sierra 10.13.5, and Security Update 2018-003 for macOS Sierra and El Capitan.
Maxim Goryachy and Mark Ermolov, two researchers from Positive Technologies, spotted the Intel chip misconfiguration --which also received a vulnerability ID of CVE-2018-4251. The two were hunting bugs in Intel's Management Engine, an Intel proprietary technology used for remote management operations, which works as a separate chip running on top of actual Intel processor.
