Hacker can shut down Apple MacBook battery

Las Vegas (CNN) -- Forget computer viruses and worms. What's maybe the worst thing a hacker could do to your laptop? Access it remotely and shut it down -- or maybe even blow it up.
Which is why famous Apple hacker Charlie Miller wanted to do just that.
"I don't want to wake up one day and have my computer blow up," said Miller, who is an avid user of Apple products. "I want to be the one looking at that -- not the bad guys."


CNN: Tell me what you were able to do with Apple's laptop batteries.
It's sort of complicated, but the way batteries get charged in your laptop is there's a little chip in your battery and the computer talks to that chip to figure out what's going on. That chip will tell it how much charge it has, how much charge it needs, how much charge it should give it -- that sort of thing. What I figured out was how to change the software that runs on that chip.

Why blow it up? Why was that the goal?
I approach it like, what can people do to me, right? So I don't want to wake up one day and have my computer blow up. I want to be the one looking at that -- not the bad guys.
So I found this thing where Apple didn't change their passwords. Well, now they're hopefully going to change their passwords, right? So then next time I buy a laptop from Apple I won't have to worry quite so much that someone will do something (bad).
I released a tool that you could run, if you're particularly paranoid, that would fix this problem.