Charlie Miller finds a way to hack MacBook batteries and use them for evil; #FEAR

Horror story: you follow a seemingly empty link, and hours later, your MacBook battery explodes! Sounds impossible? Not so much: according to the Forbes, security expert Charlie Miller discovered a common vulnerability in modern battery microcontrollers that would allow a hacker to use this component for harm.

Batteries hacked to death by Charlie Miller

Batteries sacrificed during testing.

From deploying malware to battery memory (so contamination with a virus would repeat itself even after formatting everything) to overheating and exploding, all possible thanks to the fact that the chips are shipped from the factory with a standard password and just find out what password to open Pandora's box. "These batteries are not created with the possibility that someone would want to tamper with them," said Miller. "What I'm showing you is that you can use them to do really bad things."

The default password was discovered by Miller through an analysis of an update sent by Apple in 2009 to fix problems with MacBook batteries (is this it?). With a little bit of reverse engineering, it was easy to find out how to change their firmware and control them in a variety of ways.

The presentation of this vulnerability and the proposal for a solution will be made at the next Black Hat security conference in August. At l, have #MEDO.

(via Electronist)