Mac users 'too smug' Over Security?

wild_berry writes "Bill Thompson, one of the BBC's technology commentators and presenter of Go Digital on the BBC World Service, expresses his concerns that Mac users assume their safety in the face of trojans, worms, keyloggers and other malware. As a Mac user he is most concerned about the lack of herd immunity that is needed to stop a few infections becoming an epidemic, fully explained in his column week for the BBC technology site. Is he right, and what actual products exist for OS X that would protect against infections?"

Comments

How do you protect against the unknown?

[topham]

How does the average user protect against the unknown?

When I get my new iMac ('free') I will be adding some extra security to the system. But the average user cannot do what I will be doing.

And as for the anti-virus software outthere, except for dealing with Office viruses, and maybe System 6-9 viruses what is it supposed to protect against? It's snake-oil.

How do i know they even have staff on hand to deal with an outbreak where there hasn't been anything of significance in 5 years. (yes, I heard about issues within the last 5 years, they were not particularly significant as they were risks, not outbreaks.

How many people on Slashdot actually run anti-virus software on their Linux boxes? 5%?

Re:MacOS X itself?

[TheNetAvenger]

"safer" OS

Safer? I guess, except in the past year Apple released more security and exploit fixes for OSX than Microsoft did for WindowsXP...

So again how is it a safer OS if these exploits existed in the first place?

Go stick you head in the sand until the great Mac worm hits that erases everyone's OSX drives. Then maybe people will realize that NO Operating System is completely safe. PERIOD.

Windows gets a lot of press because 95% of the world are using it, and it truly is targeted a bit more. Think about it, if you were going to write a virus to screw with the world, would you spend time finding a way to infect 5% of the world's computers or the other 95%?

Re:Dead On

[djsmiley]

I second this, i met the same resistance when in college (highschool to you kids in the u.s.). At the time we had a lecturer, who wasn't only cocky (which is bad enough) but so sure of him self in every field, although he knew nothing about computers. (It was a multimedia course).

To make matters worse, he didn't even buy the mac he used in college, he made them pay for that as part of his "materials". Eitherway, we had a room full of windows pcs, and a room of macs. Both were plagued by problems, but due to some nice *(supprisingly) network monitoring, vlans, etc by the college, most of the time the problems were contained.

To put a spin on things, i informed the lecturer that the windows pc's were going to suffer due to the fact they had high power gfx cards (which we would use for rendering) and only 300w psus. The guy decided from this point on that i was a know it all, and that anything i said would automagicly be wrong.

After all teh various fun with computers, we started getting the dreaded "hostname or ip exists on network" problems, where people had acidently, or deliberlty changed their IPs so that another machine ended up being kicked off the network when it rebooted.
I was the lucky guy on the course, i got to have the printer connected to my machine! (Scarcasim!!!) One day i got the dreaded message, but knowing what caused it, i checked my hostname and found another pc on the network sharing it. So i changed the hostname and ip of my machine and hey presto, my internet access (*which i DID need for this kind of work) once again worked.
After a little while people had to print out work and it failed over and over, due to the ip and hostname of hte printer server (my machine) being changed... the whole class was accused of "Passwording the printer" which is something im still not sure you can do i windows without creating new users etc.

However, this was the extent of the damage that was ever done on windows machines.... With the macs? well, they wuold blow up, lose work, mess us around, not have the same fuctions we used in windows (In the same programs... photoshop, illustrator, lightwave...)

fun for all the family, couple this with the fact we were using zip disks: /

network security

[willCode4Beer.com]

You think a Mac user would have the skills for a network attack? ;-)
If more than one mouse button is too confusing, how are they going to launch a network attack?

Re:Dead On

[Overly Critical Guy]

Congratulations, sir! You win the OS X Typo award. Every month, this award is given to the person who makes one of the following alarmingly common Slashdot typos:

1.) OS-X
2.) OS/X
3.) OSX86
4.) MAC instead of Mac
5.) And so many more.

It's OS X. The X is a Roman numeral to denote the tenth version of the software. Thanks for playing, and come back next month for round two of 2006! Bye bye, everybody!

Re:You are completely right...

[just_another_sean]

buy a WinDell box - You don't notice much difference at first, everything seems to work fine but after a few weeks everything starts to shrivel up and you find you have no sex drive left at all.

or, perish the thought, a Sun Solaris system?Perish the thought? When you get one of these puppies, well let's just say you better buy some new pants as well! (or bra, for the ladies).