I waited a week in the interests of being fair, but at this point, it’s safe to say Neowin lied and did not retract the lie.

Here’s the lie:

Two months after Black Hat, a vulnerability for Mac systems with Wi-Fi has been put to rest. Unearthed at the hacker convention, the exposure was originally denied by Apple. The AirPort release on September 21st, however, has proved otherwise. The Apple advisory, which does not give credit to SecureWorks (those behind finding the vulnerability), states that “two separate stack buffer overflows exist in the AirPort wireless driver’s handling of malformed frames”. The PowerBook, iMac, Mac Pro, Xserve and PowerPC-based Mac Mini are all affected. The MacBook, MacBook Pro and Intel-based Mac Mini are not.

Unfortunately, Wi-Fi-enabled Macbooks and MackBook Pro systems are susceptible to a different heap buffer overflow. A third issue affecting third-party wireless software was also addressed. This bug affects Intel-based Mac Mini, MacBook and MacBook Pro computers equipped with wireless. If an application is affected, (at the time no application is known to be affected) an attacker in local proximity may be able to trigger an overflow.

Okay Neowin. You’re officially removed from the list of shit I read. Why? Because the guy with the handle “slimy” (I kid you not) blatantly lied and no one corrected him (except for some of the commenters on the original post). Here’s the problem:

1. Apple has consistently claimed that Secureworks and their two talking heads Maynor and Ellch never contacted them with details enough to solve a bug in the drivers.
2. Apple has said that because of that, they’ve done an internal audit and found other bugs in the driver.
3. The bugs that were patched were of those bugs, not the mythological one Maynor and Ellch had supposedly uncovered yet won’t share the details of, explain, or otherwise talk about.
4. This is not the same issue demonstrated at Black Hat in any capacity because that hack was on a third party card and driver.
5. No one has ever seen this hack actually performed on Apple manufactured hardware (including Krebs from the Washington Post whose only claim was that he stood by his original report on the story which was that Maynor and Ellch claimed to have done it).

In other words, slimy fits perfectly because that’s exactly what this kind of slap is. Neowin needs to stick to what it does best. Reporting on Windows and playing the role of Microsoft fanboy. As far as anything beyond that, their tagline seems to fit.

“Where unprofessional journalism looks best.”

Indeed. This is one of the shiniest examples of it I personally have ever seen.

Technorati Tags: neowin, macbook, apple, wifi, secureworks, hack

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 1st, 2006 at 6:09 pm and is filed under Geeky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.