Security News > 2021 > May > “Unpatchable” vuln in Apple’s new Mac chip – what you need to know
Apple's brand new Mac has a security hole, right inside the processor itself!
The vulnerability is baked into Apple Silicon chips, and cannot be fixed without a new silicon revision.
As you've probably realised, the M1 at the start of the word M1RACLES specifically denotes the M1 processor chip, Apple's brand new Intel replacement that's the brain of the latest Mac hardware.
In November 2020, Apple announced with great fanfare that it would be ditching Intel and switching its Macs over to a customised ARM chip unique to its own hardware, ultimately putting ARM processors into all Apple products.
Dubbing the Mac chips the B-series would have been logical, but might have implied that they were inferior in power or performance, so they got the letter M instead, which we're guessing stands for Mac.
A program with write access to the system control register on an ARM chip could instantly turn off vital security settings such as "No execute" protection.