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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.'"
"If you're a bad guy and you want to frustrate law enforcement, use a Mac."
Hmm. Not *precisely* the kind of publicity the Mac folks were probably looking for, but with their marketshare almost any publicity is good publicity. I just think it's cool that all the FBI Infosec guys are on OS X. Makes me feel good about my migration to the platform as well (as soon as Apple posts the much-awaited G5 price adjustment).
I don't quite understand how people are good at mining data off of *nix but not off of a Mac though -- that part didn't make too much sense. I find it hard to believe that the people they were referring to were on OS9, and if they were on OSX then the boxes basically *are* *nix machines...
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
I am not really surprised that the FBI security guys use OS X boxes. Years ago I remember another government agency with a three letter acronym that used NeXT boxes it seemed almost exclusively from the situation rooms right down to the secretaries (at least in Langley).
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Steve Jobs is smarter than Bill Gates. Not only is he giving discounted hardware and software to educational institutions k12 on up, he's found another entrance vector through which to enhance the brainwashing - send in an Agent with a "Macs are more secure, too" line.
Shoulda taken the blue pill.
I guess that explains why they use Macs in Hackers.
Buckethead
I can see the headline on drudge now, "Terrorists Prefer Apple"
It's always been my experience that the guys are hot on Windows, pretty good on *nix, but very very few know anything about Macs -- my guess because of their law enforcement background, where they used and were trained on PCs.
A predominant amount of their work seems to be recreating or capturing MS Outlook mailboxes (looking for the smoking guns). They aren't as cluey on Eudora (presumably because most corporate enterprises don't use it).
Small market share means that the majority of people focus on the system(s) that form the majority of OS/apps used -- a trait which appears to extend to law enforcement and makers of forensic programs. But the really good professionals are always interested in asking "so just how does this work on a mac" and discussing the similarities/differences...
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.
"If you're a sadist/masochist when it comes to everyday uses for your PC, use a Linux based PC.
In theory you are right, the vunerabilitys in Outlook could apply to any Unix mail client. In practice they don't though. All unix mailers that I know of (pine, mutt, kmail, and so on) do not by default run programs they get from email. You might be able to configure kmail to do so, but it isn't the default. I'm sure that some mailers considered it, but once outlook got exploited a few times they re-considered. (I have no idea why Microsoft still hasn't).
If that isn't enough for you, most unix systems allow the sysadmin to prevent the user from running arbitary programs. If the sysadmin didn't install it you can't run it, (just mount /home and /tmp with -noexec) after which time you just make sure that the installed mail clients don't allow scripts. Okay, it is slightly more complex than that, but a good sysadmin can deal with it. AFAIK, Windows doesn't have this ability so an admin can't lock things down this way.
Time to strike up the drumbeat:
1. Windows defaults to let users run as root. Neither Mac OS X nor Linux do that.
2. (already noted) Macs ship with most ports shut down.
3. BSD has been combed over for years, and many eyes have searched for vulnerabilities. A lot have already been solved. Nobody can look at Windows code.
4. Macs have fewer application vulnerabilities (because unlike Windows, most applications can't make root system calls and run programs as root (for example, MS Outlook).
Sorry to be repetitive.
Sorry, what consolation prize do we have for our departing guest?
m l
Honestly, the security by obscurity thing has been disproven so many times, in so many ways for Mac OS X that I find it impossible that you're unaware. Granted, Mac OS X has security issues patches, but don't make me get into the horrid falacy: "macs are just as insecure as any other OS." They are, by design, far more secure. The exploits possible on a PC are not possible on a Mac due to Outlook, IE, messenger services, etc.
Seriously. Thanks for a good laugh. In case you're missing out on the needed information, here it is. This article sums it up very well.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/34554.ht
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
"...I was trying to plan simultaneous suicide explosions in separate third world countries using the advanced CAJ (Computer-Aided Jihad) program that comes standard with Windows XP, when all of a sudden the computer was like, beep-beep-beep-beep-beep, and I was like, what in Allah is this? And I lost all the plans. It was going to be a really good terrorist strike too! Now I use a Mac. Apple: bringing you the user-friendly tools you need to exterminate all Jews and Crusaders!"
"... and throw in emacs or vi for a complete experience"
apple has been doing unix since 1996, NeXT has been doing it since 1988.
Apple has also been doing unix since 1987 (if I have my years correct) with it's first release of A/UX, a product they supported for almost 10 years afterwards, and through three versions. If that's counted along with their work on NeXTSTEP->OSX, then that's 17 straight years of UNIX experience within the company.
Apple offers $800 laptops and $600 desktops with an included monitor (at the Apple Store special deals section - thats an everyday price not an educational deal). That is not expensive as hell, its actually quite cheap comparing the hardware / software package included. Troll Apple all you want, but their prices are quite reasonable. Have you spec'd out a top of the line G5 against a top of the line Dell? Do your homework, kid.
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.
You might want to check out this nice UNIX family tree..
You can easily see who's related to who. I might note that Solaris is much further from what we modernly call BSD than some of the others you named. I won't speak of IRIX, but AIX is a weird kind of BSD variant, as is HPUX. OSX is very very close to FreeBSD.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
uh oracle runs on OSX. at work, most of us developers have duplicated almost exactly the way our java/servlet/oracle-db-based web application (portal, 5 million unique page views/day, can't tell u more) runs on our sun solaris production boxes, onto our OS X laptops. yes that includes a copy of Oracle which officially supports OS X. mysql works just fine on OS X too. so does postgres. in fact, just about anything written in C and designed to be compiled with gcc works just fine on OS X. Oh, Apple also implemented its own *fast* version of X11. it's free with your OS. Any Desktop app u can run on linux runs on OS X just fine. yes that includes everything from Gimp, to Gnome and KDE, i mainly just use Gimp, and it's fast.
you want a free video editing software? how about iMovie, which smacks the living shit out of anything the open source community has ever dreamt to produce. the whole iLife suite comes for free with ur new mac. Last xmas i made a few videos using my mom's sony handycam, edited them in iMovie, exported them back to tape, no quality loss as u remain in DV format during the entire process. Then used iDVD to create a DVD with 4 movies and an image slideshow created from selecting one of my iPhoto albums within iDVD. Guess how i picked my movie soundtracks in iMovie? by browsing my iTunes library from iMovie and dragging songs onto the iMovie timeline. Did i mention i did all that on the same laptop i use for application development without breaking anything close to a sweat? After my vacation, i use Apple's free Backup.app to back-up all my movies and dvds projects to DVD to keep my hard drive uncluttered before getting back into work. oh and during this whole process i never ever installed a single piece of software. I simply used my operating system and what came with it out of the box.
Every single USB/1.0-2.0 and/or FireWire-400/800 device you can get your hands on is already compatible with OS X. yeah that includes my nifty USB IBM laser mouse, with 2 buttons, a clickable wheel, and another button to the side, all of which i have configured in OS X thru system preferences to trigger various aspects of expose. If you can plug it into your mac, it works. oh and you might have heard of bluetooth? i've got a sony ericsson t610 phone (t-mobile as my carrier, they rock!). i use iSync, a generic Apple-developed sync'ing API to which all PDA makers already adhere, to synchronize my Address Book and Calendar info onto the phone, and vice-versa. it doesn't stop here.
All bluetooth devices work out of the box too. no software installation required, just run the Apple bluetooth wizard for your laptop to register your device and bickity-bam, you're done.
let's talk more about interoperability here. Apple created cute little applications, disconcerting in their simplicity and ease of use: AddressBook.app, Calendar.app. Most of my IM programs automatically interoperate with my address book, so does Apple's Mail.app, my Calendar can subscribe to others' calendars over HTTP thru standard formats, other applications can interact with it as well. They're simple applications as well as powerful open APIs, all of which interoperate with iSync. iSync essentially means you can have your Palm Pilot, your iPod, your bluetooh phone, your online .MAC account, and whatever exotic PDA-ish device you can think of that somehow plugs into or connects to ur mac, all remain in accurate Sync using Apple's iSync. FOR FREE with your OS. In the windows world, such functionality is partly mimicked by 3rd party services such as intellisync that pick the few most popular devices on the market, creates separate conduits for each one, to in the end sell you a solution that allows you to sync a limited set of devices. If more devices come to the market they'll have to update their software, you'll h
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