apple_badger

melgross said:

Because it’s not really true. That is, neither DED’s, or Apple badger. When I go to conferences, I see a mix of Apple laptops, iPads, Windows laptops, and some Surface Pro models. Depending on the conference, the ratios change. But normally, Apple’s products are at least 50%.

Since I'm talking about my own observations, which I reality admit(ted) are anecdotal evidence by definition, I'm not sure how you can say that what I'm saying isn't really true. My observation, when talking about tablet-like things, has been that I see a lot of Surface Pros around where it used to be a sea of only iPads. Depending on the people in the group, mine may be the only iPad in the room, but that's rare. Manager sorts seem to prefer the Surface Pro, while technical folks and students tend to go for the iPad. Again, this is what I have noticed; you can have a completely different experience and we can still both be right  

Overall, when you include notebooks, the number of Apple devices that I see seems to be more than half, but I'm not sure if that's just down to Apple stuff being more noticeable. As the glowing Apple logo fades into history, that bias will become less relevant. 

If we want to venture out of the anecdotal space, I can tell you that over time the number of Apple devices, as a percentage of the total number of devices) on my workplace WiFi network (I work at a small Canadian university) has declined, though absolute numbers have increased. In 2010-ish, the number of Apple devices was well over 2/3s on any given day and these days it tends to be around 40%. I know this because I was challenged by a former CIO on my assertion that Apple devices made up the majority of devices on our WiFi network, so I wrote a script that tracks that  

That decline is not, in my opinion, any indicator of trouble for Apple; it's just a sign that in the mobile space the competition has gotten better. Apple isn't in trouble; the iPad is doing very, very well, but this fixation on pushing the narrative that the Surface Pro is failing seems weird to me. 

Soli said:

I wonder if the T2 or another chips will know that you've replaced the NAND. If not, then you a nefarious outfit could replace NAND with there own containing a rootkit. 

I believe that the SSD is encrypted with keys stored in the secure enclave on the T2 (whether or not you enable FileVault). Replacing the chips would mean that the new chips would contain a filesystem that's unusable by the computer until it's reformatted. 

lkrupp said:

AppleInsider said:

How, exactly, the vulnerabilities were exploited and by whom is unknown.

Both bugs were detailed in Apple documentation detailing security changes delivered with the iOS 12.1.4 package.

That’s the 64 Thousand Dollar Question.  Saying the bugs were exploited and explaining how are two different things. iOS is the Walled Garden so were apps downloaded from the App Store that did the exploit or were they confined to jailbroken iOS devices? 

Neither has to be the case: If the bugs are in iOS itself then *any* apps using the vulnerable code (if, for example, it’s in a library) have the potential to be the vector for exploitation. For example, if there is a security vulnerability in an image handling iOS library, any app that uses that library to deal with images can, if presented with a malicious image (let’s say hosted on a website), cause exploitation. I believe this has happened with both Safari and Messages in the past.

That headline, while strictly true, is a touch misleading. Microsoft is suggesting a move to Android or iOS, something that's mentioned, but the headline makes it look as if they're recommending only iOS. *I* recommend only iOS, but Microsoft seems to be less convicted :P 

I believe that the reason they're asking for reboots is so that the can monitor the first stage (persistent through reboots) attempting to download further stages, in order to better understand the infrastructure used by the malware.