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.