Closed disclosure is responsible disclosure. Moving past the terminology, I am an Apple user as well, I am pretty satisfied with how quickly Apple resolves issues.

Now if every person started disclosing vulnerabilities via twitter without giving the company turn around time to resolve the issue based on their dissatisfaction with Apple based on standards they came up with personally, I don’t think it is nice or fair.

So, obscurity is responsible disclosure? Cause being "closed disclosure" is being obscure.

A root password solves this issue. Its seconds to implement and helps right now.... Not "later" as closed disclosure does.

I'd rather know every error and critical bug. I can bring up with our team and decide now to either sudo service * stop or continue.

Your closed options keep the fact I'm vulnerable away, along with any pathways I might have to fix.

This is a rather limited view point. You forget the majority of macOS users are NOT technically savy. This is why responsible disclosure is so important as it gives tech companies time to create and push a fix to protect their users.

Disclosing this immediately puts those people who can't setup enable the root and set its password into more harm's way.

> Disclosing this immediately puts those people who can't setup enable the root and set its password into more harm's way.

Let's be clear - Apple put their users in harms way by letting a bug of this nature slip past testing. Disclosing "responsibly" would certainly be nicer to users, but mostly it would be nice for Apple by helping mitigate the bad publicity.

Apple isn't the first company to have security bugs. Is this how all 0days are to be reported?

> You forget the majority of users are NOT technically savy.

Fixed that for you.

Sorry, I'm not going to cater to the lowest common denominator of "users". If my system has a hole, I want to know so I can get in a fix or shut down that particular feature until its fixed by a vendor.

Ive only 60k machines and 40 clients that depend on that decision. And they agree with me. If something's broke, I can analyse how it breaks and if it impacts us. If it does, we can triage it. I can do a damage assessment. I certainly can't do that if it's being sold on the darknets and whispered.

> I want to know so I can get in a fix or shut down that particular feature until its fixed by a vendor.

That assumes you can shut down that particular feature without crippling your business operations. If my system had a hole, I'd prefer that it were disclosed to the vendor before it's disclosed to hackers, adversaries and foreign governments.

So, if if find a security bug with your product, you prefer that I publish it directly to twitter as a 0-day?

Yes. Ideally you would also ping me in your public release, so I know whom to pay. Because that would also for be the users benefit to know to either fix, firewall, or not use until software is deployed.

I've seen the dark side where this leads. It leads to BTC transactions and 0days bought and sold. That's the worst, further past scrappy company sitting on exploits.

I strongly believe in transparency. It empowers users and admins more than any other option out there.

I think the responsible way to handle it is, you inform Apple in a closed way. Once they come up with a fix, if you think they didn’t come up with a fix soon enough, make that information public then on how long it took Apple to turn this around. Disclosing every vulnerability to the internet and setting their ass on fire is not a good way to solve this IMO.

Obscurity is not long-term security, but it can buy you a bit of time to get a fix released and pushed out to users.

I actually do think it is in dispute. This is a tweet after all. This guy could totally tweet about it in much the same way after Apple released a patch. The negative publicity would still exist because the bug would be equally stupid and disastrous, just fewer people would be harmed along the way.

It wouldn't be as clear that the bug is widely reproducible after the patch is put out. And it certainly wouldn't gather as much attention.

Exactly. Everyone I know on Mac immediately tried reproducing this bug the moment they heard about it. On those systems where it didn't reproduce, they immediately dismissed it as a false report.

That is assuming people patch their Mac ASAP. It will still be on high alert for most media if they have disclose it few days after the bug was fixed.

Giving Apple negative publicity is not an end that justifies harming its users.