Symantec Warns of OS X Security Threat
The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Symantec,
realizing that Apple sales are on the rise and that Apple’s marketshare is growing, are warning that OS X may
soon become a target for hackers.
As you can probably tell, my take on this is that it is a marketing move more than anything to worry about. In the
close to 10 years that I’ve been a Mac devotee, I’ve only had any sort of infection twice and each time it was a Word
Macro Virus that had limited effects for me (saving all my .doc files as templates), but proved problematic for my
Windows friends who had infected computers (which were often rendered useless by the virus). OS X may very well
become a target for worms, viruses, and hackers, but it’ll still remain 99% more secure than Windows.
Read more here and
here.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Randy said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
I've been using Windows for 15 years and haven't been infected once... hardly a scientific way to prove a platform's security record.
Now, was it my OS, my AV software, or common sense with a lot of luck that helped keep me virus free all these years? All three things helped I think, but I'm pinning the majority of it on luck. That and the fact that I won't open attachments unless I know the person that sent them and even then not usually. To me that's a lot like Phishing: you can only protect the user from themselves so much.
I know Symantec loves the doom and gloom, but yes, if OS-X market share is rising at a great rate - and given the traffic at my local Apple store, I think it's increasing - I would think that there's a greater chance for infection. After all, it makes for a larger "attack surface" if there's more machines out there to pound on...
The only completely secure machine in the this world is one that is unplugged.
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Mark Lander said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
As I posted on ZDnet, Symantec's, motivation is questionable.
While the information in the study may be true and OS X is far from immune, Symantec makes a butt-load selling software and annual subscriptions to their anti-virus wares. I wonder if they're attempting to create demand for Mac security products or even reduce customer loss (switchers) by diminishing the belief that OS X is more secure.
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Wai_TungLeung said 10:26AM on 7-02-2005
Or one that never connects to the internet and you never put extenal inputs like CDs and DVDs into it.
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holophile said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
Call me a nay-sayer but I'm not overly worried about virii because Mac's "marketshare is growing".
I mean, the best estimates are only pointing to maybe 10% marketshare. Heck, the marketshare was that high just a couple of years back and we didn't have any problem. But even with 20%, why would they bother?
Windows, on the other hand, is a target for two main reasons.
First, they 0wn over 80%, so if you're going to attack a system to create widespread havoc, you aim for the majority.
And second, the system structure of the OS allows so many cracks and crevices and backdoors or loopholes to execute malicious code. It's fundamentally harder to do on OS X.
Now, I'm not saying that it's impossible, I'd be stupid to claim something like that, but it would obviously take significantly more effort than developing a M$ "hack" for a gain that's not even comparable.
That being said, I wouldn't be surprised to see people targeting Macs as a way of spreading more windows malware. The majority of users I know, don't scan their machines for virii, because they know nothing exists for the Mac (yet), but they forget about the fact that they still connect to a windows network. We could all become "carrier monkeys" =)
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Steve M said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
I saw this comment elsewhere and my first reaction was, "Symantec just wants to sell more virus protection to people who don't know better."
My second thought was "If Macintosh gets a big enough market share to attract virus writers, Steve Jobs will be even richer..."
I've used Macs, Windoze and *nix machines for over 20 years now, and I have had (wait for it) not one single virus on any of my computers. I take that back. I had a friend who got a virus once, and I put the code on a floppy disk so I could disassemble it to see how they had done it. It wasn't very impressive, and it disappeared into the trash can very rapidly.
Maybe Symantec is going to work on the new Disney Digital animation "Chicken Little."
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