Apple's defenses completely collapsed! Mythos broke through the strongest hardware in 5 days, putting 2 billion devices worldwide at risk

Just moments ago, Apple’s “Unbreakable Fortress” was shattered!

To safeguard the absolute security of 2 billion active devices worldwide, Cook secretly conducted a five-year “arms race” deep within Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino.

This technology, named MIE (Memory Integrity Enforcement), is the ultimate result of Apple spending billions of dollars, assembling thousands of top engineers, and reconstructing hardware architecture from the chip level.

Memory corruption vulnerabilities have been the number one killer that has plagued iOS and macOS for decades. This fortress was built specifically to defend against them.

However, in April 2026, this five-year-long grand defense line collapsed in just 120 hours!

And what “broke through” this fortress was merely a human engineer team of three people, along with Claude Mythos. Five years of engineering were conquered in five days.

This day is called the “Oppenheimer moment” in cybersecurity!

AI has now mastered the “nuclear code” to physically dismantle humanity’s strongest defenses.

Today, there are 2 billion active Apple devices worldwide. The Mac user base is especially unique—journalists, corporate executives, government officials—the highest-value target groups globally.

They choose Apple because Apple is the safest.

If the meaning of “safest” is being rewritten by AI, what would the risk exposure of these 2 billion devices look like?

Apple’s five-year gamble: investing one billion dollars to build a mobile vault

This week, Bruce Dang and Thai Duong, researchers from Palo Alto security firm Calif, drove directly to Apple Park and handed over a 55-page report in person.

The report shows they completed the first public macOS kernel memory corruption exploit on the M5 chip, and Apple’s ultimate defense line, MIE—which claims to block all known exploit chains—has been bypassed.

The AI assisting them in this was Mythos Preview from Anthropic.

In comparison, Google Project Zero—the world’s most renowned vulnerability hunting team—takes an average of six months to handle similar-level macOS zero-day vulnerabilities!

To understand how shocking this breach is, first, you need to know how thick Apple’s shield is.

For a long time, the core logic of hacker intrusions into Apple systems was only one: memory corruption. By causing overflows and exploiting residual memory, hackers could gradually gain the highest system privileges, like picking a lock.

Almost all high-end attacks targeting iPhone end with a “memory corruption vulnerability.” Apple’s response strategy is: since software can’t defend against it, push the defense into hardware.

To completely seal this route, Apple introduced the revolutionary MIE (Memory Integrity Enforcement) in the latest M5 and A19 chips.

First, it physically locks down the memory. Based on ARM’s MTE technology, each memory segment is tagged at the chip level, and any illegal access is intercepted at hardware.

According to official statements, MIE can “break all known modern iOS public exploit chains,” including previously leaked Coruna and Darksword attack tools.

Apple internally considers the five-year-closed MIE an “unprecedented engineering feat,” capable of instantly invalidating all publicly available kernel exploit programs!

In their view, this is definitely a blow to the attacker’s dimension.

Apple’s threat model once pessimistically assumed that only 10 to 20 top organizations worldwide could challenge this system.

In Apple’s design, the MacBook is no longer just a productivity tool; it’s a mobile vault carrying the secrets of the world’s most valuable CEOs, journalists, and government officials!

Five years of R&D, involving the entire chip team, with an investment in the billions—this is Apple’s major re-investment into its entire security architecture.

But they overlooked one variable: the speed of AI evolution.

Five days of “bloodbath”: the lightning war of AI hackers

This historic duel unfolded at a breakneck pace.

A “demolition team” composed of top security researchers from Calif, armed with Anthropic’s latest AI model—Claude Mythos—launched a direct assault on the M5 chip.

This attack-defense timeline is so fast it’s chilling.

April 25, researcher Bruce Dang initially detects a faint gap in the M5 kernel.

April 27, legendary hacker Dion Blazakis joins urgently, the team assembles, Mythos begins full throttle, frantically scanning the low-level code.

May 1, just five days later, a vulnerability chain called “MAD Bugs” is fully closed.

The result is astonishing: a program with ordinary user permissions, running on macOS with M5 chip and maximum MIE defense enabled, instantly gains kernel (highest privilege) access!

This is the first publicly known kernel vulnerability that survives and bypasses at the hardware level on M5.

It’s like spending five years building a bunker resistant to nuclear bombs, only for a neighbor’s AI to analyze the ground vibrations in five days and find a wire to pry open the door.

Human effort is insignificant before AI.

Humans + AI, forming a complete attack chain

Calif’s exploit chain runs like this: starting from a non-privileged local user, using normal system calls, combined with two vulnerabilities and a set of techniques, it elevates to kernel-level privileges, ultimately obtaining a root shell.

The entire process is completed on bare-metal M5 hardware, with MIE fully enabled.

Technically, it’s a data-only attack—no code injection, only data manipulation. This is precisely the most difficult attack surface for MIE to defend.

Throughout this process, Mythos demonstrates a terrifying “generalization and recombination” ability.

Thai Duong, CEO of Calif, candidly said: “The magic of Mythos is that once it learns attack logic for a certain type of problem, it can quickly apply it to any unknown domain.”

Although it currently cannot independently invent entirely new attack methods, under human expert guidance, it becomes a super-multiplier.

Code that would take humans months to analyze can be modeled in seconds. It can piece together two seemingly unrelated tiny bugs into a deadly weapon, like a puzzle.

In previous Firefox tests, Mythos identified 100 high-risk vulnerabilities in two weeks, while human experts took two months to find the same number.

Of course, AI is not omnipotent in this process.

Mythos’s strength is pattern recognition, but MIE is a brand-new defense system. Autonomous bypassing exceeds current AI capabilities.

At this point, human intervention fills the gap!

Bruce Dang’s vulnerability intuition, Dion Blazakis’s exploit engineering experience, Josh Maine’s tooling—these three plus AI form a tiny but deadly attack team.

Cupertino afternoon: that 55-page “judgment”

The most dramatic scene happened at Apple Park in California.

The Calif researchers didn’t just submit their report via cold email—they drove directly to Apple’s $5 billion “spaceship” headquarters.

They brought a 55-page, laser-printed, beautifully bound technical report.

In front of Apple executives’ stunned eyes, this report was like a “judgment” delivered late, silently declaring the myth of MIE to be broken.

Apple’s response remained official and polite: “Security is our top priority, and we are seriously addressing this report.”

But everyone knows Cook has probably been sleepless these days.

If even Apple’s carefully crafted five-year M5 defense, integrated with the strongest hardware and software, can fall in less than a week to AI, then what part of the world remains safe?

Anthropic’s security experts are currently assessing AI risks.

“Oppenheimer moment”: the collapse of the security industry’s logic

Apple’s M5 collapse is just a technical failure, but behind it reveals a terrifying fact: the entire security industry’s logic has completely collapsed!

First, $2 million of wealth evaporates.

Now, a macOS zero-day vulnerability sells on the black market for over $2 million.

This high price is because teams capable of breaching Apple’s defenses are extremely rare. Previously, it would take top global teams like Google Project Zero six months to research such vulnerabilities.

Once, Apple arrogantly believed only a few major national organizations could threaten it.

But now, Mythos has lowered that threshold!

Small startups armed with AI tools like Mythos, or even individual researchers, now possess “nuclear deterrence.” The number of threats is exploding from double digits to four digits.

Moreover, human defenses are now virtually useless against AI.

Traditional defense logic: discover vulnerabilities -> write patches -> push worldwide.

But now, the security circle has a new term: Bugmageddon. The speed at which AI discovers vulnerabilities surpasses human patching speed—by a factor of ten.

Survive or perish?

The irony is: when Apple built MIE, Mythos didn’t exist.

Apple’s security engineers did everything right—moving the defense from software to hardware—but they didn’t foresee AI’s emergence.

At the end of Calif’s report, there’s a paragraph:

“Apple designed MIE in a world without Mythos. And what we are about to see is how the world’s strongest defense technology will survive in the tide of AI vulnerabilities.”

Once AI learns how to bypass the most fundamental physical defenses, our digital lives—bank accounts, private photos, autonomous driving, national power grids—will be exposed in a transparent, extremely dangerous state.

The White House is already taking emergency action, trying to regulate these “overpowered” AI models via executive orders.

But Pandora’s box, once opened, can never be closed again.

We are witnessing history: last night, hardware defenses collapsed; tomorrow, human security hits zero.

Welcome to the new era of AI offense and defense.

Here, humans have nowhere to hide.

Source: Xinzhiyuan

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