14 DAY TRIAL // The Mac hacked in 30 minutes story has come and gone, and a week from now many will not even remember it, but it is the perfect example of the trend that surrounds OS X security. The Operating word here is FUD, an acronym for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, which perfectly described the story in question.
The original rm-my-mac test was indeed a very poor test of security. For one thing, it gave any would be hackers local accounts, with which they would have inside access to the machine. The fact that the original article omitted this fact is a serious oversight. The fact that even more news sources picked up on it and blew the entire thing out of proportion is even worse.
To counter the horrendous journalism that took place, the Mac OS X academic security challenge was launched, in which would be hackers were invited to attempt replicating the results obtained in the original challenge, but this time without being given local user accounts. Nothing happened, in over 36 hours.
The saddest part is that if one was to actually look at the original challenge, it was also failed. The original challenge, as the name implies, was to rm the Mac. rm is a Unix command that deletes files and folders from the hard drive, so the challenge was to basically erase the entire contents of the Mac, something that has not happened so far, the site, which is presumably run off the machine is still up. The challenge has not yet been met, all that has happened is that the hacker gained access to Apache and modified the web site, the machine was not rm-ed? so why all the fuss, why the constant string of articles and misinformation?
It seems that Apple and their machines have reached stardom status and this is the computer equivalent of paparazzi trash news regarding Hollywood super stars. It's all about views, reads, clicks? money. The more sensational the story the more money you can make off of it. Journalism has been relegated to the backseat, letting profit drive the show.
Apple has never made a big deal about security on their machines, despite their users shouting left and right about how safe they were, I guess the move makes perfect sense on Apple's part now. The press would have eaten them alive, and buried them in countless badly written and badly documented articles about supposed threats. Sure, OS X is not infallible, if anyone thought it was, they probably also believe in the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, but the users feel secure on it.
At the end of the day, computer security is a hard thing to measure. Do we look at how secure a platform is by counting the number of security breaches? That's like trying to determine how much of a virgin someone is by looking at the number of times he or she has had sex. Do we look at the number of exploits and vulnerabilities available for each platform? That's like looking at how secure a house is by counting the number of doors, windows, and wires that make up the alarm system. Do we look at damages caused by security breaches? That isn't relevant either because value and worth are relative to the possessor, my couple of thousand pictures may not be worth much, in terms of money, but they are worth a lot to me.
Is Mac OS X secure? I cannot answer that question, but I will tell you that I work day after day with no fear of my computer being broken into.