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Apple-losing-its-edge

Is Apple losing its edge?

Apple laptops and desktops are often the favourite hardware for businesses, partly for quality and partly because they have always been seen as largely hack-proof.

But a recent problem has caused some technical writers to question whether the “big A” is beginning to lose its edge.

A flaw was discovered in the most recent version of MacOS High Sierra, that enabled anyone to enter the machine without a password.

The bug was discovered in late November by a Turkish developer, who discovered that entering the username “root” and leaving the password field blank, hitting “enter” a few times, he could gain access to the machine.

The vulnerability, which fortunately could not be used remotely, could give someone with root access more powers than a normal user, for example to read and write files to other accounts.

More seriously a superuser with root access and with malicious intent could have deleted crucial system files, rendering the computer useless – or install malware that might be undetectable to typical security software.

Apple issued a temporary workaround by allowing users to set a root password while it fixed the problem.

The instructions are here

However, according to the tech publication WIRED, there were more problems when Apple rushed out a patch, within 18 hours, and users discovered that the “root” bug returned if they updated to the 10.13.1, version.  The machine had to be re-booted for the patch to work, but Apple had not included this in the instructions.