Apple is once again in the news for something they’re certainly not happy about: Another coding bug has been found in the MacOS operating system, this time allowing hackers to change the data of a computer’s most privileged code.
As this piece from Wired explains, the BuggyCow trick (named after the loophole hackers found in the OS’s copy-on-write or CoW protection) “takes advantage of the fact that when a program mounts a new file system on a hard drive – basically loading a whole collection of files rather than altering just one – the memory manager isn't warned. So a hacker can unmount a file system, remount it with new data, and in doing so silently replace the information that some sensitive, highly privileged code is using.”