Although these types of features are always welcome, if they are not carefully handled they can be exploited by hackers and used for illegal works, for example, to spy on users, just as it has happened to the tech giant Apple with a macOS feature. For a long time, the tech giant Apple has been synonymous with security. This operating system was very clean and was neither vulnerable to viruses nor had security flaws. However, things have changed and this operating system is now as vulnerable to malware as it can be Windows, and also hides inside security flaws that, on occasion, have endangered users. Recently, a security researcher, Felix Krause, has discovered a security flaw in macOS, the tech giant Apple’s desktop operating system, which can allow an attacker to take screenshots of any monitor connected to the computer without the users themselves being aware of it. The vulnerability in question is found in the CGWindowListCreateImage function, and it can be exploited regardless of whether it runs inside a sandbox or not. So, once exploited this security flaw, hackers can easily take screenshots of what the user is doing, the websites it visits, their emails, password managers, their bank details, almost everything.
When the hacker takes a screenshot, in addition, he/she makes use of the OCR functions to read the image and convert the characters into text, thus being able to recover the information as such much more easily. How can we protect ourselves from this security flaw in macOS As explained by a security expert, there is no way to protect us from this vulnerability, at the moment, since this function cannot be disabled and there is no Apple patch to protect us either. The tech giant Apple is expected to solve this problem with the next update of macOS, although, for now, the company has not made any statements about it. It is not known either how the tech giant Apple will choose to solve this security failure, although there are 3 possible ways to do it:-
Limit the use of these functions exclusively to the legitimate applications of the App Store, preventing others from using them. Make users have to give permission for applications to access the screen. Show a notification when an application accesses the screen (it does not solve the problem, but it lets us know that something is happening).
For now, we can only wait for the tech giant Apple to launch a new update of macOS with the solution it deems appropriate to protect us from this security flaw. So, do you think that the tech giant Apple has abandoned the security of its entire ecosystem a bit? Simply share all your views and thoughts in the comment section below.
