14 DAY TRIAL // Mac OS X security is a joke. There, I've said it. Now let me bring the necessary arguments. Mac is an operating system perceived as secure by default. But is this consumer perception based on actual facts or is it a myth? Well, security in a sense is the combination of code quality and a relaxed threat environment.
And the Mac OS certainly benefits from a relaxed threat landscape. At just 6% of the operating system market, Mac OS seems to go by unnoticed by malware authors. "Today we know of over 236,000 malicious malware items. These are mostly meant for the MS-Windows environment. Only about 700 are meant for the various Unix/Linux distributions. Current known Mac OSX malware count is even less with 7, so pretty much non-existent at the moment. For older builds of the MacOS there are 69 known malicious items, with an additional 8 items for MacHC that used hypercard script extensions which had to be manually installed as an addon package," revealed McAfee security researcher Marius van Oers.
The reason for this status quo is the reduced audience of Mac OS. Malware writers will target the most popular operating system and malicious code will prevalently follow technology and mainstream culture. Mac OS is neither.
And how about code quality. I have seen this a lot and the general tendency is to believe that Mac OS is an operating system superior to Windows. If you think of the whole deal with advancing the world's most advanced OS, I don't know where Mac users got the ideea that Mac OS delivers more quality and security than Windows... Do you?
The fact of the matter is that the user's perception that Mac OS is foolproof and faultless is a myth. It is just the opposite. According to a report published by Jeff Jones, a Security Strategy Director in Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing group, Windows Vista has outperformed Mac OS X in terms of code quality in the first 90 days of commercial availability.
While Microsoft patched a single vulnerability in Windows Vista out of five reported since November 30, 2007, Apple issued security updates for 20 vulnerabilities impacting Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, 8 of which were highly severe, in its first 90 days on the market following the April 29, 2005 launch.
"Apple advertising conveys the message that Mac OS X does not have the same security issues that face other operating systems, but upon examining the first 90 days of their most recent release Tiger (v10.4), here is what I found. At the end of the 90 day period, there Mac OS X v10.4 still had 17 publicly disclosed vulnerabilities that did not yet have a patch from Apple," Jones stated.
While the threat environment will continue not to focus on Mac OS X, the Mac users will be safe, but once the malware authors realize that Tiger and Leopard are just as vulnerable as the next operating system, hold on to your seats because Apple fans will storm the stores for anti-virus programs, or for Windows Vista.