Charlie Miller has a habit of publicly upending Apple's security claims. Real cyberspies may be doing the same thing in private. Charlie A. Miller loves his Macbook Pro laptop. And his four other Apple PCs, the iPhone he uses daily and two older iPhones he keeps for tinkering. But his relationship with the company that created those gadgets is somewhat more complicated.
In March, for instance, the 36-year-old security researcher publicized his discovery of 20 security vulnerabilities in Apple software. Each would allow a cybercriminal to take over the computer of a user who's tricked into opening a certain PDF attachment or who simply visits an infected Web page using Apple's Safari browser.

That haul of security bugs is a record even for Miller, who over the last four years has become perhaps the world's most prominent Mac hacker. It may also be the most definitive proof yet that Apple devices aren't safe "right out of the box," as the company has claimed for years. "When I first began saying that Macs were less secure than Windows, everyone thought I was an idiot," says Miller. "So I had to prove it again and again and again."

In 2007 Miller became the first to hack the iPhone, using a flaw in its Safari browser to remotely gain control of the no-so-smart phone. Six months later he hacked a Macbook Air in two minutes at a competition in Vancouver. Last summer he revealed a method that allowed him to virally hijack the iPhone using text messages spread via a user's contact list.

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