The Sleekest Botnet

The Apple store is always impressive. It's not the elegant use of glass, especially glass stair cases, nor the surfeit of outwardly cheerful employees sporting classy badges. It's the fifty or so top of the line Macs that anyone can walk up to and start using.

Apple has turned into the Barnes & Noble of computer (or electronics) stores. When Barnes & Noble first appeared they were able to grab such a significant piece of market share because you could wander in, read a book, and leave without buying anything. All the local bookstores were upset since they couldn't compete with the market of scale Barnes & Noble had created. (Now copy cats, like Borders, are starting to eat into Barnes & Nobles' market share.)

Why try to clandestinely check your email at Office Depot when you can roll into Apple and spend 3 hours "friending" people? Perhaps you'll even end up buying that 29.99 pair of headphones that you could purchase for 6.99 at a corner store, at the least you'll keep the store filled.

You could also use these publicly accessibly computers to do many other things. The adage, "physical access equals game over" is still true. You could plug in a thumb drive and at the very least get the box. Maybe you could even get the LAN, and if not, just stroll over to another shiny 2ghz box and that's that. Maybe they do some hardening but I know Disk Utility works fine on the Macs (erase free space, partition, format). Being optimistic, suppose thumb drive machine access leads to owning the LAN. So that's one store, can you hop through the internal network and get another store? If not take a quick walk, subway, or taxi ride and now you have two LANs. Is this possible (yes)? Is this hard (probably not)? Failing a thumb drive, you have internet access on the box, why not just download?

Has this not happened yet? If it has what has the exploiter gained? Very simplistically you could walk in and go to a Mac, download and install a stealthy key logger (hardware or software), then walk out and see what happens. I've seen lots of people checking email accounts (I've checked my low security email account) on an Apple store Mac. Have you ever seen someone checking a bank account? Even if not, email account access gives an extremely large amount of information, identity theft anyone?

If this has not happened yet (and I doubt it) it will happen soon and someone, then many people, will learn why public terminals are dangerous.

Update: I've noticed some Macs that are more locked down, I think they have parental controls on. Still, it's a closed source operating system, who can't break mac parental controls on those?