Apple not immune as new virus spreads

#Virus#Hackers– Apple not immune as new virus spreads– If there is one big advantage of owning a Mac, it’s that they aren’t targeted with viruses and malware with the same regularity as Windows devices. While users of Microsoft’s software see antivirus and malware detectors as a necessity, it’s likely that they barely raise a blip on a Mac user’s radar.

In fact, for a while, Apple traded on the fact that its computers didn’t get viruses. So there may have been a few wry smiles at the news that Macs are potentially vulnerable to a bug that spreads through infected hardware.

The work of white hat researchers, the vulnerability and the resulting worm has caused some hysteria online, and has shaken the belief that Apple’s security is almost impenetrable.

What is it?
Thunderstrike 2 is a firmware worm. It targets the core firmware of the machine, which you might know better as the BIOS, UEFI or EFI. This is a low level code responsible for booting your computer and launching the operating system, whether it is Windows or OS X.

It’s a set of instructions for your computer that tells it how to boot up, where to find different elements and what to do once it’s woken.“It’s half way between software and hardware,” says Dermot Williams of Threatscape.

“It’s the software that’s built into the hardware.”Researchers found a series of vulnerabilities that affected PCs and Macs, allowing malicious code to be inserted into the firmware despite protections put in place by hardware makers to try to prevent it.

The original Thunderstrike was discovered earlier this year, but required physical access to a machine to infect it, making it a little more difficult to spread the worm.