Apple's macOS Suffers From Thumbnail Catches Bug That May Leak User Informations

macOS has a very useful function - Quick Look, when the the user selecte certain files, pictures, you can press the space bar to preview the...

macOS has a very useful function - Quick Look, when the the user selecte certain files, pictures, you can press the space bar to preview the details. However, this practical feature has recently been found a bug, of which its preview thumbnail storage mechanism will lead to the user's encrypted files easily to be leaked.

Security researcher Wojciech Regula first discovered and published the bug disccovery on The Hacker News website. When macOS implements the Quick Look feature, it will generate a thumbnail file or folder and then cache it in a specific area of the hard drive.

But Regula found that Apple did not store these thumbnails on Mac's encrypted hard drive, but instead stored it in an open area. So a file even though sets it up as an encrypted file, it will be completely exposed by the thumbnail cache file that is saved by Quick Look.

It's worth to say that the issue has at least existed on Mac for eight years, but we expect that Apple will fix it rather sooner than later. We recommend that you should clean your thumbnail files more frequently.