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FBI Agent Talks Crime, Macs
hype7 writes "There's an article at SecurityFocus describing a visit an FBI agent to Washington University. His visit was ostensibly about computer security and the general public's complete lack of any idea on computer security whatsoever: 'I have spent a considerable amount in the computer underground and have seen many ways in which clever individuals trick unsuspecting users. I don't think most people have a clue just how bad things are.' His talk ranged from some of the pranks he's seen played on unsuspecting users, to Eastern European extortion of big banks." WeakGeek added, "FBI security guys are using Macs because, 'those machines can do just about anything: run software for Mac, Unix, or Windows, using either a GUI or the command line. And they're secure out of the box.' Another good quote: 'If you're a bad guy and you want to frustrate law enforcement, use a Mac.'"
They're only secure because, with such a minimal share, nobody cares about breaking into one.
Bullshit. Market share has nothing to do with it. There's at least as many Apache-based servers out there as IIS, but there are like 2 Apache worms.
And frankly, there are enough Mac-haters around that surely some would like to take Apple down a peg via a virus or some sort of exploit in OS X. How come it's never happened? How come in three years there hasn't been a single OS X virus discovered?
Apple have had several fixes just in the last few months fixing remote root access vulnerabilities.
Yeah, and the difference is, they were found and fixed without being maliciously exploited. Most of them were very unlikely to be exploited anyway, or were found in services that were off by default. The last one I heard about would allow a brand new machine to get owned if a rogue DHCP server happened to be sitting on the LAN. Yeah, that's likely to happen.
Contrast this with Windows, where shit is wide open by default, and the first anyone hears about a hole is usually when it has already brought the internet to a crawl. Not that patches for exploits do any good when people don't apply them-- I just took a look in my firewall logs, and I'm still getting Nimda and Code Red infection attempts.
Linux is like a friend's old TR7. He spent more time under the hood trying to keep it running than he did actually driving it. Mac OS X is for those who want to get to a destination, in speed and with style; instead of piddling around tinkering with the machine.