Dec 21 2006
Spank you, Helpy Helperton!! January to be a Month of Apple Bugs
As reported a few days ago by The Washington Post’s Brian Krebs (among others), New Year’s Day will be the start of a month long security nitpick project for a couple security researchers bent on proving that the Mac platform is not bulletproof. The pair evidently have 31 Apple OS and application flaws that they plan to divulge, one each day, over the course of January. And rather than report these vulnerabilities directly to Apple and keep the information away from the dark forces of the net, they are intentionally keeping Apple out of the loop to prove their point–Macs are no more secure than any other computing platform.
I don’t know about you, but it is not news to me that Mac’s are not without their security flaws–I’m sure they have innumerable exploitable glitches. The point has been that Macs are less plagued by those who would exploit its flaws. There are no real viral threats to the Mac OS in the wild while there are thousands of viruses and other malware that attack PCs. Macs: not more secure, just not as frequently and viciously attacked.
The fact that Macs aren’t as much of a target for hackers has been thanks in some part to the unfavorable research to results ratio when compared to the Windows platform. With so many serious hackers working to exploit Windows PCs, the casual hacker (aka “script kiddie”) need not do much in the way of research to find a weakness in Windows that he can play with–multitudes have done his homework for him. There really haven’t been a whole lot of attacks on the Mac by casual hackers, but with boneheads like the Month of Apple Bugs team working to point out the problems with the Mac, we may just see the birth of the Mac script kiddie.
Thanks, guys. Really.
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