The following is a guest post by noar (@noarfromspace), a long time friend. It shows some simple attacks against BlockBlock, a software developed by Patrick Wardle that monitors OS X common persistence locations for potential malware. The other day noar was telling me about a few bypasses he had found so I invited him to write a guest post. The title is obviously playing with one of Patrick’s presentations. I met Patrick at Shakacon last year and this is not an attempt to shame him (that is reserved mostly for Apple ;-))....

I guess my goal for the remaining 2015 of not doing any presentations will not happen. Two weeks ago I presented at BSides Lisbon 2015 and last week at SECUINSIDE 2015. I’m very happy to see BSides Lisbon returning after the first edition in 2013. Congrats to Bruno, Tiago, and the rest of the team for making it happen. It’s still a small conference but I’m glad they are making it happen, and I will always do my best to help the Portuguese scene going forward....

The suspend/resume vulnerability disclosed a few weeks ago (named Prince Harming by Katie Moussouris) turned out to be a zero day. While (I believe) its real world impact is small, it is nonetheless a critical vulnerability and (another) spectacular failure from Apple. It must be noticed that firmware issues are not Apple exclusive. For example, Gigabyte ships their UEFI with the flash always unlocked and other vendors also suffer from all kinds of firmware vulnerabilities....

If you are a rootkits fan the latest Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) in 2014 brought us two excellent presentations, Thunderstrike by Trammell Hudson and Attacks on UEFI security, inspired by Darth Venami’s misery and Speed Racer by Rafal Wojtczuk and Corey Kallenberg. The first one was related to the possibility to attack EFI from a Thunderbolt device, and the second had a very interesting vulnerability regarding the (U)EFI boot script table....

The rootpipe vulnerability was finally fully disclosed last week after a couple of months of expectation since its first announcement. It was disclosed as a hidden backdoor but it’s really something more related to access control and crap design than a backdoor. Although keep in mind that good backdoors should be hard to distinguish from simple errors. In this case there are a lot of services using this feature so it’s hardly a hidden backdoor that just sits there waiting for some evil purpose....