Hijacking a Macbook in 60 Seconds or Less, or maybe not

[tongodeon]

Yesterday there was a story about hacking a MacBook remotely by manipulating its wireless drivers that Slashdot picked up today. I was dubious, so I found the video. As I expected the story is a little misleading. The demonstration video that the articles mention starts with the researcher adding a third-party USB card that looks a lot like a

Comments

[tongodeon]

Ah, I should have elaborated. US Robotics does not provide any OSX drivers for the USR805422 that they appear to use. It's not just that the drivers were "not approved by the Apple Driver Reichstag", they're "not easily obtainable anywhere", and therefore whatever they *did* find is a complete mystery to me and therefore "not trusted".

There are of course some standard open source drivers for various Atheros and Broadcom chipsets which it seems likely that they used instead. In this case if *I* were doing this it would be a lot easier to modify those drivers before installing them and then picking some USB hardware that's particularly optimal at helping you pull off this exploit rather than using apparently nonexistent stock drivers or demonstrating an attack on a stock machine with stock drivers as they claim to be able to do but are avoiding for reasons that dr_strych9 claims are bullshit