New Airport Driver Exploit Released For Some Older Macs

Just as the Black Hat wireless card exploit was beginning to die down, an exploit in Apple's built-in Airport drivers for some older Macs has been released.

According to the site hosting the proof-of-concept, the driver supplied with Orinoco-based Airport cards (1999-2003 PowerBooks, iMacs) is vulnerable to a remote memory corruption flaw, which could lead to arbitrary code execution if the target is in Active Scanning Mode (i.e. is searching for a base station). The exploit was claimed to have been run on a system running 10.4.8 with all existing patches applied.

It did not appear as though the hackers announcing the exploit and hosting the proof-of-concept code had contacted Apple about the vulnerability prior to the announcement. Nowhere on the site do the hackers claim they had contacted Apple, but rather they reveal the following about their intentions:

With all the hype and buzz about the now infamous Apple wireless device driver bugs (brought to attention at Black Hat, by Johnny Cache and David Maynor, covered up and FUD'ed by others), hopefully this will bring some light (better said, proof) about the existence of such flaws in the Airport device drivers.