Apple MACs and UNIX
While PC owners running Windows are being hammered by e-microbes in various shapes and sizes, Apple MAC owners sit back rubbing their hands gleefully because they’ve never been bugged. And they never will be bugged because, "Mac software is simply better than Windows software.
"So there."
That’s Alex Salkever in his BusinessWeek Online story here, and as he puts it:
"In the wake of the MyDoom/Novarg fiasco, every Mac columnist has an easy out. After yet another virus attack has hammered the Windows world, the automatic response has been to pen the standard Mac gloat."
Such columns, "generally elicits the standard Windows community reply," he goes on. "The reason you don’t get viruses is because so few people have Macs. In fact, hackers think Macs are so marginal they don’t even bother with figuring out ways to break into them or infect them with viruses. If 95% of the world used Macs, you can bet they would catch viruses all the time."
There’s truth in both arguments, and the "comparative dearth of juicy targets in Mac-land without a doubt contributed to the lack of attention from the digital underworld," says Salkever and, "Few self-respecting hackers would want to waste their time plumbing the files of a bunch of advertising agencies or grade-school computer networks, two areas where Macs maintain a strong presence."
But the same time, "OS 9 Mac software was to some degree less impervious to virus infection. Traditionally, Macs have been far more compartmentalized than their Windows counterparts. It has always been harder to use a hole in a browser to access other parts of the Mac operating system.
"Also, Macs used their own funky languages, such as data-communications protocol Apple Talk. That meant miscreants seeking to write viruses for Macs would have had to learn new coding skills which, invariably, were a bit more complicated than the paint-by-numbers Visual Basic, the favorite coding tool of virus writers.
"Still, it’s an exaggeration to say that the old Mac software was dramatically more secure than Windows on all fronts. Some of the same types of social-engineering attacks that enticed users to download software from infected e-mails could easily have affected Mac users on OS 9. And back in the dark ages, when Macs still represented a larger percentage of personal computers, there actually were a handful of instances in which Trojan Horse attacks were aimed at Apple products."
But that was then, and this is now – ‘now’ being a new era with Unix under the Apple hood, and a time when Steve Jobs can no longer rely on "security through obscurity".
"Apple has joined a big family – and it keeps growing, thanks to Linux and other open source versions of Unix," says Salkever.
But, he admitys, within this family, Apple has a unique position as, "the only decent-sized maker of Unix operating systems designed for people who don’t even know what Unix means".
Apple needs to protect these people from things that go bump on the Net, he states, and to do so without requiring any of the tech know-how usually required for messy Unix computer security.
And according to Salkever, Apple isn’t doing a bad job.
"OS X comes with a default setting that requires a login name and password before it allows any new software to be installed on a given computer," he points out. "With this default, no Mac user needs to worry about inadvertently clicking on e-mail attachments carrying virus software.
"Most Windows users who clicked on attachments to Mydoom e-mails didn’t understand they were actually installing software on their machine. With OS X, it’s a dead giveaway – any piece of code that tries to install itself on a Mac, surreptitiously or not, will elicit the login and password prompt."
Automatic software updates makes it painless to download the latest system fixes, he goes on, and Apple also requires users to set up passwords on their administrator accounts and:
"Every OS X computer has one, so even newbies use them, even if they don’t realize that’s what they’re doing. These accounts have higher privileges with regard to altering software or manipulating the inner workings of the Mac. In Windows XP, no password is required for the administrator’s account. You need to set that up yourself – a simple task but one that many less tech-savvy Windows owners probably don’t understand.
Not everything in OS X is secure, Salkever concludes – ie, the relatively short length of the passwords for accessing individual accounts isn’t a good thing, and security experts have found a steady stream of bugs in OS X requiring fixes – but, "for lowest-common-denominator attacks coming through e-mail attachments such as Mydoom, Apple offers far better protection than Microsoft. That’s particularly encouraging now that the Mac is playing in the far rougher and more populous Unix neighborhood, where security shortcomings could lead to disaster."
