held it for a few seconds and let them go. He pressed SHIFT+FN+CONTROL+POWER at the same time (the first 3 keys are in the lower left corner). This time the guy at the Genius Bar did some kind of 'soft' SMC reset. So I took it the the Apple Store and they cracked it open to do a physical SMC reset. The power button stopped working and the machine would not turn on at all. The machine simply shuts off and doesn't restart so the firmware update is never applied. 'Even if you're running the most recent version of macOS and have installed the latest patches that have been released, our data shows there is a non-trivial chance that the EFI firmware you're running might not be the most up-to-date version,'ĭuo also found 47 models that were running 10.12, 10.11, 10.10 versions of macOS and did not receive the EFI firmware update with patches to address the known vulnerability, Thunderstrike 1.I had the same issue. 'For the main EFI vulnerabilities that were acknowledged by Apple and patched during the time of our analysis, there were surprising numbers of models of Macs that received no update to their EFI despite continuing to receive software security updates,' Duo researchers say. You will be surprised by knowing the numbers for some specific Mac models-43% of the analysed iMac models (21.5' of late 2015) were running outdated, insecure firmware, and at least 16 Mac models had never received any EFI firmware updates when Mac OS X 10.10 and 10.12.6 was available. On average, Duo said 4.2% of 73,324 real-world Macs used in the enterprise environments were found running a different EFI firmware version they should not be running-based on the hardware model, the operating system version, and the EFI version released with that OS. What's worse? In addition to neglecting to push out EFI updates to some systems, Apple does not even warn its users of the failed EFI update process or technical glitch, leaving millions of Macs users vulnerable to sophisticated and advanced persistent cyber attacks. 'In addition to the ability to circumvent higher level security controls, attacking EFI also makes the adversary very stealthy and hard to detect (it's hard to trust the OS to tell you the truth about the state of the EFI) it also makes the adversary very difficult to remove-installing a new OS or even replacing the hard disk entirely is not enough to dislodge them,' Duo researchers say.

EFI runs before macOS boots up and has higher-level privileges that, if exploited by attackers, could allow EFI malware to control everything without being detected.

Apple efi firmware update