37 vulnerabilities solved by Apple

Mar 24, 2005 00:32 GMT  ·  By

As soon as the news that the sales of MacMini are increasing, Symantec rushed to announce that the operating system is not invulnerable to virus attacks, as many users considered.

Even if Symantec's announcement is well founded, the comments regarding MacOS security are somewhat hallucinating.

After initially admitting that in comparison to Windows and even UNIX, MacOS has definitely less vulnerabilities, Symantec states later that due the popularity increase of this operating system, the people who exploit these vulnerabilities will become more interested in identifying them.

Until now, nothing special! There is not an operating system that doesn't have vulnerabilities and in its report Symantec stated that in 2004 only 37 security breaches were identified, all of them being corrected by Apple.

But in Symantec's report there is a phrase which pushes things into the twilight zone: "The market penetration of Macintosh platforms will be accelerated by the much lower priced Mac mini, which may be purchased by less security-savvy users. As a result, the number of vulnerabilities can be expected to increase, as will malicious activity that targets them".

In other words, does this mean that users who will buy MacMini platform are not interested in security and as a result, vulnerabilities will increase? Applying the same logic and considering that Windows has a market quota of 90%, we now realize why Windows has so many vulnerabilities. Moreover, is the software producer acquitted of all responsibility?

The antivirus offered by Symantec for MacOS costs 70 dollars and the complete security package is 150 dollars, that's half the price of a MacMini. In this case, Symantec's concern could have other reason than the MacOS security. And that would be keeping the users unaware of the price paid for security.

Apple didn't make any comments to Symantec's statements, but having a market quota of 5%, it is unlikely that the hackers' dream will be finding the MacOS X vulnerability.