Mac OS X Zero-Day Exploit Can Bypass Apple's Latest Protection Feature
Mar 25, 2016
A critical zero-day vulnerability has been discovered in all versions of Apple's OS X operating system that allows hackers to exploit the company's newest protection feature and steal sensitive data from affected devices. With the release of OS X El Capitan, Apple introduced a security protection feature to the OS X kernel called System Integrity Protection ( SIP ). The feature is designed to prevent potentially malicious or bad software from modifying protected files and folders on your Mac. The purpose of SIP is to restrict the root account of OS X devices and limit the actions a root user can perform on protected parts of the system in an effort to reduce the chance of malicious code hijacking a device or performing privilege escalation. However, SentinelOne security researcher Pedro Vilaça has uncovered a critical vulnerability in both OS X and iOS that allows for local privilege escalation as well as bypasses SIP without kernel exploit, impacting all versions
