Inside One of the Biggest Apple Device Hacks Ever

For years, Apple has claimed its devices are the most secure and unhackable in the world, even releasing an entire ad-campaign in the 2000s pitting a PC, played by a bespectacled and unsure-of-himself Office Space type extra, against the suave and hip MacBook represented by that guy who dies at the end of Jeepers Creepers.

But just this week, Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai broke the news that MacOS, the operating system for all of Apple’s commputers, had been compromised by what is being described as one of the biggest hacks of Apple products ever (and they don’t happen often). Security researchers discovered a bug in MacOs that has been exploited by hackers for years to inject adware onto people’s machines without them knowing.

The latest Apple hack now makes three so far in 2021: malware called Silver Sparrow was discovered on nearly 30,000 Apple computers in February, while yet more malware targeting M1 processors was also found around the same time. As Lorenzo explains on this week’s episode of CYBER, Apple devices are being more widely used than ever before, which means more people are trying to break into them than ever before. While PCs and Androids outnumber MacBooks and iPhones, the gap is narrowing and the hacks of Apple are increasing.