Apple Just Patched a Modem Bug That's Been in Macs Since 1999

And Apple finally patched it in April.Hill, who is now a vulnerability researcher, is presenting the 20-year-old bug at the Objective by the Sea Mac security conference in Monaco on Sunday. And since Apple operating system adoption rates are always high, there isn't a significant population of truly retro Mac software out there to target."It’s not really a scary bug," says Hill, a cofounder at the mobile firewall maker Guardian. I used some of my old tricks to basically find which places would be vulnerable."Apple did not return a request for comment about Hill's findings or the historic nature of the bug.The original version of the attack simply took advantage of a service Apple used to offer called Remote Access. Hill found that these old modem configurations still underlie the network tools in Macs today, including those that automatically create network configurations for peripherals you might plug in—like an ethernet cable or a mobile USB hotspot.The exploit centers on a sort of universal translator Apple created for modems known as the CCLEngine, which helps interpret and orchestrate data links between two computers.