No, your Mac isn’t immune to malware
There was a time when Apple-users had a certain superiority: 'got Mac, no hack'. Those days may soon be gone with researchers showing off a new 'potential' iOS worm that could end the era of invincibility. &nbsp;The worm is said to rely on a series of firmware vulnerabilities that impact both PCs and Macs and being firmware-focused malware it is extremely difficult to detect.
The common wisdom when it comes to PCs and Apple computers is that the latter are much more secure. Particularly when it comes to firmware, people have assumed that Apple systems are locked down in ways that PCs aren't.

It turns out this isn't true. Two researchers have found that several known vulnerabilities affecting the firmware of all the top PC makers can also hit the firmware of MACs. What's more, the researchers have designed a proof-of-concept worm for the first time that would allow a firmware attack to spread automatically from MacBook to MacBook, without the need for them to be networked.

It’s really hard to detect, it’s really hard to get rid of, and it’s really hard to protect against something that’s running inside the firmware. Trammell Hudson

The attack raises the stakes considerably for system defenders since it would allow someone to remotely target machines---including air-gapped ones---in a way that wouldn't be detected by security scanners and would give an attacker a persistent foothold on a system even through firmware and operating system updates. Firmware updates require the assistance of a machine's existing firmware to install, so any malware in the firmware could block new updates from being installed or simply write itself to a new update as it's installed.

The only way to eliminate malware embedded in a computer's main firmware would be to re-flash the chip that contains the firmware.

“[The attack is] really hard to detect, it’s really hard to get rid of, and it’s really hard to protect against something that’s running inside the firmware,” says Xeno Kovah, one of the researchers who designed the worm. “For most users that’s really a throw-your-machine-away kind of situation. Most people and organizations don’t have the wherewithal to physically open up their machine and electrically reprogram the chip.”

It’s the kind of attack intelligence agencies like the NSA covet. In fact, documents released by Edward Snowden, and research conducted by Kaspersky Lab, have shown that the NSA has already developed sophisticated techniques for hacking firmware.

The Mac firmware research was conducted by Kovah, owner of LegbaCore, a firmware security consultancy, and Trammell Hudson, a security engineer with Two Sigma Investments. They’ll be discussing their findings on August 6 at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

It’s the kind of attack intelligence agencies like the NSA covet.

A computer's core firmware---also referred to at times as the BIOS, UEFI or EFI---is the software that boots a computer and launches its operating system. It can be infected with malware because most hardware makers don’t cryptographically sign the firmware embedded in their systems, or their firmware updates, and don’t include any authentication functions that would prevent any but legitimate signed firmware from being installed.

Firmware is a particularly valuable place to hide malware on a machine because it operates at a level below the level where antivirus and other security products operate and therefore does not generally get scanned by these products, leaving malware that infects the firmware unmolested. There’s also no easy way for users to manually examine the firmware themselves to determine if it’s been altered. And because firmware remains untouched if the operating system is wiped and re-installed, malware infecting the firmware can maintain a persistent hold on a system throughout attempts to disinfect the computer. If a victim, thinking his or her computer is infected, wipes the computer’s operating system and reinstalls it to eliminate malicious code, the malicious firmware code will remain intact.

5 Firmware Vulnerabilities in Macs

Last year, Kovah and his partner at Legbacore, Corey Kallenberg, uncovered a series of firmware vulnerabilities that affected 80 percent of PCs they examined, including ones from Dell, Lenovo, Samsung and HP. Although hardware makers implement some protections to make it difficult for someone to modify their firmware, the vulnerabilities the researchers found allowed them to bypass these and reflash the BIOS to plant malicious code in it.

Kovah, along with Hudson, then decided to see if the same vulnerabilities applied to Apple firmware and found that untrusted code could indeed be written to the MacBook boot flash firmware. “It turns out almost all of the attacks we found on PCs are also applicable to Macs,” says Kovah.

They looked at six vulnerabilities and found that five of them affected Mac firmware. The vulnerabilities are applicable to so many PCs and Macs because hardware makers tend to all use some of the same firmware code.