Basically anything that is Apple-made boasts the strength of its internal security (and the lack of enthusiasm for would-be hackers to actually hack a Macintosh) – no viruses, no malware, no hacks.

However, at the recent Black Hat security conference staged in Las Vegas, Nevada, a number of security researchers have demonstrated that consumer software is far from being secure – iPhones and Macintoshes included.

Charlie Miller and Collin Mueller, both researchers attending the said conference, have shown that iPhones can be taken over completely by merely sending it a special SMS message. Granted, the SMS message has to be tailored specifically for the task, and while not everybody can actually weave malicious code into a text message, if done right, it lets the attacker take complete control over the iPhone.

By exploiting how the iPhone allocates memory when handling SMS messages, an attacker can do everything the owner of the iPhone can do: make calls, send messages, browse the internet, steal data, or render the iPhone unusable.

Further into the conference, Dino Dai Zovi, a security expert and co-author of “The Mac Hacker’s Handbook” together with Miller, demonstrated that Macs have a security exploit that allows hackers to take complete control of a machine, and use it to steal data, complete with data encryption to protect the hackers’ identities.

Miller says that Apple’s products are seemingly more secure than its Microsoft counterparts, but in actuality, there is a greater possibility for malicious activity in Macs. The underlying programming for Macintoshes are more loosely coded, and present with a substantially larger amount of code than Windows, for example.

Dai Zovi warns that as Macs become increasingly popular, so do the interests of hackers worldwide to put in effort to break the system.

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