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Apple is riding a success wave fueled by the market performance of the Mac computers. And while the Cupertino-based hardware company was pushing in excess of 2.15 million Macs per month back in the third quarter of 2007, ahead of the advent of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, its proprietary operating system also grows its own market share in the background. Statistics delivered by Net Applications reveal that at the end of 2007, Mac OS X accounted for over 7% of the operating system market, just behind Vista which passed the 10% mark in December
of the past year.
But with the added Mac OS X audience also come inherent caveats. With an install base of in excess of 70 million users worldwide, Mac OS X is increasingly coming in the focus of attackers. The DNSChanger Trojan horse aimed at Apple's operating system is an illustrative example of such a scenario. And as Mac OS X will increase its footprint on the operating system market, the threat landscape will react, responding with new threats tailored to the platform.
In this context, F-Secure has come across the first rogue cleaning tool for Mac. MacSweeper is nothing more than the equivalent of Cleanator on Windows, indicating that old social engineering tricks are truly platform agnostic. "Rogue/fake applications (scareware) such as this have been around for years on Windows (WinFixer, SpySheriff, et cetera). They're designed to trick people into thinking that they have security problems and that the only way to solve it is to buy the software. Up until now this has been a Windows only problem, but that's not the case anymore," revealed an F-Secure security expert.
"So what does the first Mac rogue application really mean? It means that with Mac's growing popularity and growing user base comes certain problems that can't be ignored. Mac users will increasingly come under attack from bad guys and this new rogue application and the constant stream of new variants of DNSChanger is proof of that," the F-Secure member added.
With an install base of over 100 million users, Windows Vista is somewhat safeguarded from attacks, first by the added mitigations that Microsoft has poured into the operating system, but also via the result of the Secure Development Lifecycle process. And on top of it all, Vista has the huge umbrella that is Windows XP above it, attracting the vast majority of exploits, attacks, viruses. Mac OS X on the other hand is as exposed as they come - more so since Apple has been building a completely safe, and bulletproof, operating system on marketing propaganda alone, a status that is by no means reflected at code-level.
Mac OS X, Leopard included, is a security disaster waiting to happen. And sure enough, some might reply that the Windows security disaster has already happened. Nothing could be more true. Windows XP Service Pack 2 was designed to recover XP from being a security liability. With Windows Vista however, Microsoft has not repeated the mistakes it has done with XP RTM back in 2001. Still, F-Secure does not share this perspective, commenting that Mac Sweeper "doesn't mean that Mac is becoming less secure in and of itself. But it does mean that Mac users will have to watch out for social engineering tricks just like Windows users have had to do for years."
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