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Charlie Miller finds MacBook battery security hole, plans to fill with Caulkgun
Those batteries have probably met a worse fate than the white MacBook line they came from. According to Forbes, Charlie Miller's managed to render seven of them useless after gaining total access to their micro-controllers' firmware via a security hole. Evidently, the Li-ion packs for the line of lappies -- including Airs and Pros -- are accessible with two passwords he dug up from an '09 software update. Chuck mentions that someone could "use them to do something really bad," including faulting charge-levels and thermal read-outs to possibly even making them explode. He also thinks hard-to-spot malware could be installed directly within the battery, repeatedly infecting a computer unless removed. Come August, he'll reportedly be detailing the vulnerability at the Black Hat security conference along with a fix he's dubbed Caulkgun, which only has the mild side-effect of locking-out updates by Apple. Worth being safe these days, though. Right? Full story in the links below.
