Sep 8, 2010 09:07 GMT  ·  By

Renowned Mac hacker Charles Miller was happy to share a few thoughts on Mac security with the people at Mac Directory, who sat down with the researcher to find out exactly why Apple’s platform is labeled as being far more secure than Microsoft’s Windows, and how he ended up the leading and fastest hacker of Apple products today.

Mac Directory acknowledged for Miller that word on the street still is that “Apple products” are safer than Windows-based products.

Asked to opine whether this is because hackers are too busy hacking regular PCs, Miller confirmed: “They [Macs] are safer exactly for the reason that not many criminals are looking at them.”

“Most malware is written with the purpose of compromising as many hosts as possible, and that means Windows,” Miller explained.

“There is nothing inherently more secure about Macs, in fact they’re probably a little easier to break into, but really they are protected for the moment by their limited market share,” he told interviewers.

Asked to pinpoint what factor made him the leading and fastest Apple hacker today, Charlie elaborated: “Besides the fact I like and use Apple products, I think a lot of it is I was first to the party."

“There weren’t many researchers interested in Macs when I started looking at them so I got to find all the low hanging fruit,” he claimed.

However, the hacker felt compelled to outline that, despite being easy to break into (at least for him), “Apple products are way more secure now than three years ago.”

Another noteworthy observation from the security expert concerns Safari, the Apple-developed web browser that ships with every Macintosh computer, as well as with iPhones, the iPod touch, and the iPad.

Historically, Miller has had no problems compromising the browser by exploiting various vulnerabilities he was able to find through the years.

But while it is rather painless to hack Safari, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer remains the most attractive target, Miller said.

Talking about Apple’s web browser, Charlie noted: “It’s a little easier to hack because it is so full functional. Out of the box, Safari will run any QuickTime file, Flash, Java, etc.

“By contrast,” he said, “Internet Explorer won’t parse any of those files. The reason it isn’t being exploited is simply that with only slightly more effort, bad guys can write IE exploits and can break into way more computers with it,” Miller concluded.

Needless to point out, the MacDirectory interview pretty much states the obvious, although it's always good to stay in the loop with security experts' opinions.

Softpedia itself recently scored an interview with a security buff, weighing in on various topics, including the overall security in Windows compared to that of Mac OS X and Linux.

AVAST Software CTO Ondrej Vlcek told Softpedia, “I think we will be seeing more and more attacks towards Mac.”

Corroborating Miller’s beliefs, Vlcek added: “Of course, it's still a minor platform in terms of market share, currently estimated to be between 6% and 7%, compared to something like 92% or 93% for Windows.”

“For attackers it's much easier to focus on 90+%, but that's changing; the market share is growing all the time,” he clarified for Softpedia.

“And also as the platform is getting more popular it's quite evident that there are a lot problems in the security of the Mac OS in general,” he added.

“What I mean is that Apple's approach towards security vulnerabilities is not very fortunate. It somehow reminds me of Microsoft's style from maybe eight, ten years ago,” Vlcek said.