First revealed in November 2020, with the release of Big Sur, the Cupertino giant removes a highly controversial feature that allows a handful of Apple. According to security researchers, Apple had excluded the said apps from being overwatched by the feature, namely, NEFilterDataProvider. Apple’s NEFilterDataProvider is quite a cluster of content filters incorporated by third-party applications, VPNs, and firewalls for filtering traffic flow of data.
Big Sur was the first-ever OS from Apple to feature ContentFilterExclusionList, which allows several apps such as Maps, App Store, iCloud, among others, to avoid VPN and firewall apps. Moreover, the apps weren’t able to inspect or filter traffic for the Cupertino giant’s built-in apps.
Upon being discovered by a team of writers, Apple immediately responded that the apps’ list was a temporary addition to this new OS. In addition to this, it resulted in a collection of bugs related to minimizing the swarming of kernel extensions in the revolutionary macOS Big Sur. After addressing the bugs for over a couple of months, Apple released the second beta version of macOS Big Sur the day before. Further, removing ContentFilterExclusionList from the OS in the due process.
After the big release of macOS Big Sur, cybersecurity researchers like Patrick Wardle and many others already predicted the forthcoming disaster, which did happen. Moreover, the researchers took it to mass media to argue that this unprecedented malware can seamlessly latch on Apple’s apps, which are developed in-house. At the time of writing, Apple has revealed that it has fixed some bugs, bringing more changes to the macOS over the forthcoming months.
