“A report by Agence Presse-France from this year’s DefCon hacker convention in Las Vegas centered on comments from security analyst Cameron Hotchkies. Hotchkies, who works with Zero Day Initiative to find and report security vulnerabilities in Apple software, gave a talk on Mac OS X hacking this past Saturday to a packed room. ‘There are a lot more people getting into it and really getting their hands dirty,’ he told AFP. ‘I’ve been seeing a lot of reverse engineering on the Apple platform,'” Chris Foresman reports for Ars Technica.
“The article goes on to ‘explain’ that an increase in Windows ports and iPhone jailbreaks are evidence that users should start to be worried about hackers and malware,” Foresman reports. “The truth is that increased scrutiny could lead hackers to target Mac OS X, but users jailbreaking an iPhone or a Windows developer porting poorly-written code to Mac OS X isn’t going to lead to rampant malware problems overnight. Users jailbreak iPhones to add software capabilities that aren’t approved by Apple; a bad Windows port is not likely to sell in very high numbers on a Mac.”
Full article, which also rightly reminds readers to be wary of social engineering (phishing and trojans), here.
MacDailyNews Take: Somehow this is “news” yet again, this time to Agence Presse-France. The same “report” has been published quarterly, at least, for the last half a decade. Yet, somehow, we Mac users manage to survive and surf the Web unimpeded on our Macs in the face of all of these “reports.”
In the full Agence Presse-France article, Glen Chapman reports, “Hackers have historically focused devious efforts on computers using Windows operating systems because the Microsoft software has more than 90 percent of the global market, promising evil-doers a wealth of targets. Macintosh computers have been gaining market share and catching the interest of hackers.”
That the Mac is secure via obscurity is a myth. Why, if obscurity means security, in April 2007 was there a virus for iPods running Linux (a few thousand devices total, at most, in all the world), but there are no viruses for the 30 million or so Mac OS X computers that are currently online? Hello? Bueller?
Uh, oh – logic is certainly not what AV software peddlers, Windows PC box assemblers, and the rest of the leeches stuck to the Windows ecosystem want people to hear. Fear is what they’re after. Increased Mac sales always result in increased anti-Mac FUD. It’s as sure as death and taxes. The sheep must be kept in the Windows pen, no matter the cost to reputations, reality, productivity, sanity, etc. Far too many have far too much invested in Microsoft Windows for them to stand idly by and let it all slip away due to a vastly superior solution from Apple. But slip away it does nonetheless.
The idea that Windows’ morass of security woes exists because more people use Windows and that Macs have no security problems because fewer people use Macs, is simply not true. By design, Mac OS X is simply more secure than Windows. Period. For reference and reasons why Mac OS X is more secure than Windows, read The New York Times’ David Pogue’s mea culpa on the subject of the “Mac Security Via Obscurity” myth here.
“Security via Obscurity” is a defense mechanism for the delusional and also tool for Microsoft apologists and/or those who profit from Windows to keep the sheep in the pen. 30 million Mac OS X installs is not “obscure” at all, but seven (7) years of Mac users surfing the ‘Net unimpeded certainly is “secure.” Besides social engineering scams (phishing, trojans; no OS can instill common sense) the only thing by which Mac users are really affected are large swaths of compromised Windows machines slowing down the ‘Net with spam and nefarious botnet traffic targeted at exploiting even more insecure Windows boxes. Get a Mac.
