Interesting that they’re mentioned as only being exploited on Intel. Has anyone seen whether that’s because the attacker only targeted that platform or is it actually stopped by something like pointer protection?
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Unless they're assuming it's exploitable on Apple Silicon as well, or are being extra careful just in case.
Things like OpenCore Legacy Patcher prove it's possible; they just don't want to.
I don't think anyone feels entitled to new features in perpetuity. Security updates only would be fine thank you.
Don't tell me the richest company in the world can't pay for a couple of developers who just want to rest and vest to take care of and test the legacy platforms. A cushy job and you keep the customers happy.
Ironically the best way to stay safe on these computers is to install Windows or Linux.
1. All hardware and software should come with a highly visible end of support date.
2. All hardware and software should notify people when it is no longer receiving security patches. It should also explain to users why running unpatched software or hardware is dangerous.
https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher
macOS Big Sur and newer on machines as old as 2007
macOS Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma and Sequoia
Do they find these by monitoring the brokers of zero days or analyzing devices of people who are being targeted?
they also have insane peering and backbone network infra, run one of the largest cloud providers, host basically everyone's email, documents, and file storage, chat, app store, and have a native browser installed
I'm sure they have many different signals they can look at to see compromised type behavior differing from the profile they have on you
Is kinda weasel-wordy, if you read it with sufficient cynicism.
Its doesn't rule out them also being aware of reports (or actual instances) of it being exploited on iOS or Apple silicon Macs.
It _might_ actually mean "Apple could not deny in a lawsuit that it's been sent a report of this being exploited on Intel Macs."
MacBook Airs from 2020 support Sequoia - so just the very upper limit of your range is relevant.
My expectation is a table of OS versions and EOL dates published in advance. Like nearly every other responsible OS vendor in existence. Apple continuing to get a pass on this in 2024 is abhorrent.
If you read some of the text above the product list, you'll see that Apple does publish guidelines about when products can be expected to be added to the list:
> Products are considered vintage when Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 5 and less than 7 years ago.
> Products are considered obsolete when Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 7 years ago. Monster-branded Beats products are considered obsolete regardless of when they were purchased.
> Apple discontinues all hardware service for obsolete products, and service providers cannot order parts for obsolete products. Mac laptops may be eligible for an extended battery-only repair period for up to 10 years from when the product was last distributed for sale, subject to parts availability.
So as you can see, it's not arbitrary or unpredictable when a product is going to show up on the vintage product list. The only unpredictable or obscure part of this process is finding out how long an outdated product was still being sold after its successor launched.
At my old job we supported only two versions of our software product, Tanzu Operations Manager versions 2.10.x and 3.0.y), and we cut new patch releases every few weeks (similar to Apple's cadence). Bumping dependencies was a pain. Well, usually it went fine, but sometimes you'd hit a gnarly incompatibility and you'd either pin a Ruby package to a known version or try to modify the code just enough to make it work without making a major change.
If I had to put a number to it, I'd say it cost us 2 developers to keep our older product line consistently patched, and our product was a modest Ruby app, much less complicated than an entire OS.
I’ve certainly addressed a potential issue with code that I thought might have occurred even when I couldn’t confirm it with 100% certainty.
A detailed analysis / testing and confirmation that provides certainty may take longer than addressing code.
The iPad 5 in question from the OP supports iPadOS 16 and that last got a security update in August of this year. So if it hasn't got an update today then possibly the vulnerability was only introduced in iOS / iPadOS 17.
Apple for the most part has one codebase that they build for their different architectures. They've been doing this since the NeXT days when they supported Motorola, Intel, Sparc, and maybe a couple of other architectures.
We are talking about software support here.
The vintage products list is specifically targeting hardware support; e.g. how long Apple will keep spare parts in stock. After a set number of years they purge stock and you are SOL going to Chinese third party vendors and places like iFixit for batteries etc.
The advantage of everyone running a disparate environment of many of different libraries and binaries is that vulnerability is likely unique. The disadvantage is there are many more opportunities for the researcher to find vulnerability in the mess.
Choose your poison, the only secure system is powered down.
https://security.samsungmobile.com/workScope.smsb
My qualm with them is though that not all devices are updated at the same time (like iOS/iPadOS/macOS). One phone may get an update the 10th of the month, while another only gets it the 30th. As a result, there is often quite a large window where vulnerabilities are known, but not yet patched (it's even worse with the cheap models that only get quarterly updates).
The company urged users across the Apple
ecosystem to apply the urgent iOS 18.1.1,
macOS Sequoia 15.1.1 and the older iOS 17.7.2.
maliciously crafted web content may lead
to arbitrary code execution
Linux will get there, but currently macOS is much more secure as a desktop.
IIRC yes. Back around maybe iOS 4-6ish a web-based jailbreak existed, don't remember exactly when
This site is very old by now and does not support recent firmware, but you can still use it.
JailbreakMe is the easiest way to free your device. Experience iOS as it could be, fully customizable, themeable, and with every tweak you could possibly imagine.
Safe and completely reversible (just restore in iTunes), jailbreaking gives you control over the device you own. It only takes a minute or two, and as always, it's completely free.
Please make an iTunes backup before jailbreaking.Is Apply really releasing new patched OS updates every few weeks?
Do you regularly visit "hot-iphone-porn-apps.info" and other untrusted sites? Do you expect sites you do visit, like "google.com" or such, are going to serve up malware?
Do you expect hackers who build these very labor-intensive exploit chains will want to try and hit as many low-value targets as possible, leading to apple patching the exploit quickly, or to try and hit high-value targets only so it's not noticed by apple as quickly and can be used against more high-value targets to make more money in total than doing a "spray and pray" with it?
What thought process do you think would lead to using the exploit against as many people as possible vs selling it to zerodium.com or a similar company for more money than you can get from spraying, and then zerodium reselling it to israel to hack into the iphones of a few key palestinians?
The only thing that kept this under control was there was an agreement to not target US-based numbers and the exploit was expensive.
Reference: The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/28/magazine/nso-group-israel... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)
If that holds true, that would be an importent addition to the discussion.
The comment I replied to was about a public website that could jailbreak an iPhone though.
For example, I have 2015 macbook pro. The last macos release for it is Monterey. Even brew has problems with that, erroring out when installing packages like libpng and complaining, that I should upgrade xcode cli tools. Which I can't.
> Pegasus' iOS exploitation was identified in August 2016. Emirati human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor received a text message promising "secrets" about torture happening in prisons in the United Arab Emirates by following a link. Mansoor sent the link to Citizen Lab of the University of Toronto, which investigated, with the collaboration of Lookout, finding that if Mansoor had followed the link it would have jailbroken his phone and implanted the spyware into it, in a form of social engineering.
So the link was sent via text message, but you had to click on it. Receiving the text message did nothing in and of itself.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)#Development_... for timeline.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)#Saudi_Arabia for the iMessage version.
Such a hardware backdoor is rather more severe than most of what has ever been discovered on non-Apple devices.
As long as the main protection of the Apple devices consists mostly in their lack of detailed technical documentation, one can never know whether other such hardware backdoors exist.
With absolute certainty. Google ads has triggered downloads of Windows executables on NYtimes.com for me before and I am confident attackers will keep trying. The idea that advertisers get to run JavaScript on clients makes that problem effectively unwinnable even though they spend considerable amounts trying to make it hard to slip dodgy code into ads.
Good security is layered. For example, even with a sandbox escape, and app could not read your full Documents directory, modify the OS, or install a firmware-level rootkit.