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.
FUD, FUD, glorious FUD….
I drive a safe car and I’ve never been in an accident. Therefore I’m going to drop my car insurance. My home has never been burglarized nor have I ever had a fire, therefore I’m also going to drop my homeowners insurance. As a matter of fact, since I’ve never had a major illness I might as well also cancel my health insurance.
Inoculation and flu shots are also unnecessary.
The insurance and health companies do nothing but spread FUD. I don’t trust any of them.
I’ve been doing just fine for 52 years; spending money on insurance and health care is a waste of money.
Larry Seltzer? That is what Michael Savage calls Larry King on CNN.
Troll article designed to elicit a hit traffic response.
Apparantly this guy hasn’t done any homework to utter such nonsense.
Tar and feather his ass and run him back to Redmond FUDquaters as soon as possible.
George Mandell,
Anti-virus software compares incoming code in new e-mail attachments, downloads and portable media to a database of known malware to see if the incoming code is harmful.
There is no sense buying anti-virus software if the database that the software checks is empty because there is no known malware in the wild that attacks the OS in question.
Today’s Mac OS X anti-virus software is a useless waste of money. Just because Windows users need it, that does not mean that it will help a Mac user.
Would an immortal, if they existed, need life insurance or a pension plan?
Larry Seltzer is a jackass. He once ripped into the iTunes music store for various things, such as inability to buy gift cards on the iTunes “site”. When I pointed out on his blog how he was wrong, and all those missing things were there, he never responded. He still owes Apple an apology for that.
He’s the resident security specialist at that crap site. He must be feeling pressure to keep his job, so produces this article to get some needed hits. People have a limit on how much crap they can will about XP security, so his hits must be pretty low.
So never (magic word) read him. Just read MDN or Gruber to get the gist of his crap.
Big Al
Of course…Like I said…I’ve never been in an accident…and I never expect to be in an accident, so why get insurance? It makes no sense buying insurance when I have never been in an accident and I’m a safe driver driving a safe car. Insurance is a useless waste of money.