The verdict is in: OS X is as insecure as anything out there, but somehow nobody — including attackers — cares. – Larry Seltzer, in an eWeek opinion piece titled “The Mac Landscape: Full of Empty Threats?“
“That’s quite a verdict,” John Gruber writes for Daring Fireball.
Seltzer: When it first came out in July, Symantec’s report ‘The Mac OS X Threat Landscape: An Overview’ revealed a collection of vulnerabilities and potential attacks that rivaled any major operating system (at least in their shipping versions). The updated version, released earlier this week, reinforces these conclusions, and in fact things are getting worse.
“Symantec’s report is, in fact, interesting, and for the most part fair. It does list an assortment of known vulnerabilities and areas of potential attack against Mac OS X, but nowhere in the report does it indicate that the “collection” as a whole rivals that of any other operating system. Nor does the document indicate that much, if anything, regarding Mac OS X security has gotten worse since the initial version of the report in July 2006,” Gruber writes.
Gruber writes, “What the Symantec report proves is that Mac OS X is not somehow magically invulnerable or immune to security exploits, which is a position no one but utter fools has ever espoused. Seltzer’s logic seems to be that an operating system is either invulnerable or vulnerable, and since Mac OS X is vulnerable, that means it’s in the same position as Windows.”
“That leaves Seltzer with the problem of explaining why Mac OS X doesn’t suffer from a comparable number of actual attacks as does Windows or other systems,” Gruber writes.
Full article, “Jackass of the Week: Larry Seltzer,” here.