WIN_JELLY infects a Mac through the Nvidia video card implemented in the company's laptops Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC),, this component having a vulnerability that endangers users all over the world. The hackers who discovered the vulnerability claim that they have successfully infected Windows or Linux computers that have Nvidia video cards, but even Apple's Macs are not immune to the problem, proof of the fact that they are vulnerable will be provided in The following period.
After being infected with WIN_JELLY, the computer can be accessed remotely by hackers, who can completely control the product to steal data or launch attacks on the Internet against any source. For Macs, MAC_JELLY is to be released, the special malware that allows controlling Apple products, the whole problem being quite difficult to solve.
A team of anonymous developers who recently created a Linux rootkit that runs on graphics cards has released a new proof-of-concept malware program that does the same on Windows. A Mac OS X implementation is also in the works. The rootkit requires AMD or Nvidia dedicated graphics cards and the OpenCL drivers. The Open Computing Language (OpenCL) is a framework for executing code on GPUs and other types of processors.
Vulnerabilities of video cards i can pass undetected by the operating systems because their processing power is often used for various tasks, many of the antivirus programs avoiding scanning the memory of these components. To infect Macs, hackers will use OpenCL, a standard software installed in OS X, so theoretically anyone with a Mac can be infected.
Considering the way this malware is designed, it is unlikely that Apple will solve the problem by updating the malware definitions, so either there will be programs that will scan the memory of the video cards, or more serious interventions in the operating systems will be needed .
