14 DAY TRIAL // Eugene Kaspersky says Apple needs to wake up and smell the roses. Security has become a top priority for the Cupertino giant, and it should act accordingly, considers the security expert.
Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab has been heavily involved in the discussions regarding the Flashback Trojan targeting Apple’s Mac OS X in the past few months.
It was only recently that a botnet managed to infect hundreds of thousands of machines, prompting action from Apple and major security vendors worldwide. Kaspersky, for its part, documented the findings, analyzed the risk level, and issued malware removal tools.
However, it’s the engineers at Apple who have to be most vigilant starting now.
“I think [Apple] are ten years behind Microsoft in terms of security,” Kaspersky told CBR in an interview.
“For many years I’ve been saying that from a security point of view there is no big difference between Mac and Windows. It’s always been possible to develop Mac malware, but this one was a bit different. For example it was asking questions about being installed on the system and, using vulnerabilities, it was able to get to the user mode without any alarms.”
Kaspersky says Apple needs to buckle up and prepare for a bumpy ride filled with “updates, security patches and so on.”
“We now expect to see more and more because cyber criminals learn from success and this was the first successful one. They will understand very soon that they have the same problems Microsoft had ten or 12 years ago,” he said.
The Kaspersky Lab boss expects Apple to make drastic changes in their update cycles and product refreshes.
“They will have to make changes in terms of the cycle of updates and so on and will be forced to invest more into their security audits for the software,” he said, pointing out to Microsoft’s situation after incidents like Blaster and various worms that infected millions of computers.
“They had to do a lot of work to check the code to find mistakes and vulnerabilities. Now it’s time for Apple [to do that],” said Kaspersky.