On Friday, December 31, 2004, at 05:36 AM, Rosie wrote:
If you're saying OS X and Mac's in general are less likely to get Bit by
something nasty. In light of the simple fact that Mac's have about a 3-5%
total market share I'll agree. Frankly this makes them a far less appealing
target.
It makes them a far harder target to propagate a virus through. There are serious 1337 h4X0r points to be had getting that first effective OS X virus out there; I suspect that the lack of Mac viruses have NOT been for lack of trying.
The changing nature of the systems security threat does makes attacking OS X less likely. Estimates are now that a sizable minority, if not majority of virus attacks are now commercially motivated, paid for by organized criminal groups, in order to generate masses of zombie'd PC's for the purposes of sending spam or DDOS attacks.
Why else do you think AOL is now advertising they're giving away AV software for free? It's not because they have their customer's precious computers in mind, it's because AOL is one of the biggest sources of SPAM on the planet, and they're going to face legal and civil consequences if they don't clean up their network.
However if think that effective and very nasty malware couldn't be
written to effect both OS9 and OS X you're sadly mistaken. The people who
get their jollies from writing malware simply haven't up to this point spent
the time energy and effort to come up with ways to compromise OS X. They put
99% of their efforts into finding better and nastier ways of compromising
WindowsXP and PC's. We'd all they find we were plagued with the exact same
set of problems that PC's have if this were to suddenly change make no
mistake about it...
No. As a matter of fact, there are significant underlying causes for the vulnerability of Windows to these sorts of attacks that have little to do with it's popularity. Security is *still* an afterthought to Redmond.
In OS X a user has to authenticate *each* time they do an action requiring administrative access to the system, and only admin users can do that.
In Windows, if you're logged on as an administrative group member, such permission is presumed, and you're never asked. The problem is: by default, the first user on a Windows XP system is an admin user, and this is often the only user on a system.
OS X builds on a underlying architecture of of Unix, where security issues of who needs what permissions to do what have been a central issue since the beginning of the system.
Windows is built on a mindset of "One person, one computer, disconnected". Much of today's security crisis can be traced back to Microsoft's great turnaround of the 90's, when the "Internet happened" and MS was woefully unprepared to make use of it. They bodged together a whole OS to deliver this connectivity, and getting it shipped took first through tenth places in the list of todo's, followed by killing bugs, having nice icons and then security.
What MS doesn't seem to realize fully is that their current situation as as perilous as those first stirrings of the internet. They've released their first bodged attempt (WinXP SP2) at securing their systems, but their underlying architecture will always hobble them. They seriously wounded themselves when they made IE not a standalone program, but a built-in component of the entire system.
Were OS'es attacked in proportion to their market share, OS X would have some 1200 viruses targeting it, versus the actual number, which is ZERO.
The Linux community was very shocked when it happened to
them a few months back. Let's hope it doesn't happen to the Mac community as
well.
Wha? There have always been security issues with Linux, as well as Mac OS X. During the life of OSX there have been dozens of security issues, most patched pretty quickly. Nothing has 'shocked' the linux community.
There have been some holes this year that, due to the underlying libs being integrated into a wide variety of tools, affected a lot of systems but still, upgrading those underlying libs fixed the problem.
Patches were also generally available within days if not hours.
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