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Computer 'Worms' Turn on Macs
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Macs have been laregly immune to the viruses, worms and malware that have plagued PCs, but the Mac's recent popularity uptick has meant that 'bad guys appear to be casing the joint,' the Wall Street Journal reports. Among the signs: two recently discovered worms and the discovery of a vulnerability in Mac OS X that leaves Safari open to a hack. A Symantec engineer predicts a 'gradual erosion' of the idea that Macs are a safer operating system than Windows. 'Some security experts believe hackers are becoming more interested in writing nasty code for Macs precisely because of reports of its relative immunity to security woes,' the WSJ reports. 'Apple itself has gone out of its way not to promote the Mac's relative safety, lest it tempt hackers to prove the company wrong. Apple declined to discuss the topic of security in depth for this article.'"
A Symantec engineer predicts a 'gradual erosion' of the idea that Macs are a safer operating system than Windows.
Now there's a neutral party with no agenda when it comes to security!
Honestly, the worst Mac malware I've seen so far had a Symantec sticker on the box.
Fleur de Sel
The could report a worm or virus a day for the rest of my LIFE and they'd still have a better security record than Windows.
Windows has had what, like 200,000 Virus's in the last year? Apple has had two or three theoretical exploits that either require the user to run code by hand or else target services that most mac users don't turn on. Sounds like Apple is doing its job to me. And honestly this idea that as Apple gets more popular there will be more viruses is largely a load of crap. The notoriety of writing the first real virus for OS X would be vastly more than for writing yet another windows virus. The reason why no one writes viruses for Apple is most likely because people like Apple and want them to succeed. I think if people start writing viruses for Apple it will be because Apple gets lazy and stops innovating, or else stops at least trying to fix the bugs in its software. Because right now both the means and the motive or there, but it's just not really happening.
but don't think that running an "obscure" OS makes you safe
*sigh* We don't. We think running an operating system with proper security makes us safe.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
I guess this will test whether Apple's approach to security (i.e., pretty much like Unix's) is better or worse than Microsoft's.
I.e., will these worms affect the whole computer because of a fault in the operating system, or will they affect only a single user on the computer because of a software issue that let the worm in to play in that user's space, or will it affect people only because of user stupidity ('ooh, really, clicking on this will make my pen0r bigger!')?
Note that Microsoft gets critical security issues fairly often with their approach.
The recent Apple issues have been lowest rated security issues.
Certainly I think that not having users run as root by default will help Mac OS X, but that doesn't stop them entering their password when prompted.
You can't secure against user stupidity except by scanning each file that they try to execute for viruses. And that means virus checkers, and the associated slowdowns they bring.
Every piece of code is subject to exploits. Show me a program/OS that is 100% infallible and I will show you a liar. I think that the main reason OS/X (and *nix for that matter) was considered to be rock-solid is because very few people were taking shots at it. Now I do realize that *nix-based OSs do plug up the obvious holes that MS left open. But don't assume that just because no one has broken into your house yet that your house is completely secure.
A computer is only as secure as its maintainer. I am running a small network at home that has a mishmash of linux and Windows computers. Now is it right for me to say that my linux computers are more secure just because they are running linux? No, that's stupid. The same thing applies with this story - Macs can be exploited because that is the nature of the business. We usually find the holes because some numbnut exploits it.
Just my $0.02
- Andrew
I meta-moderate because I care.
Hopefully very few. With the current state of affairs, anti-virus software for the Mac is a case of the cure being much worse than the disease. Even these recently discovered worms and the Safari vulnerability are relatively benign and can be protected against with a little common sense. In fact, most users hopefully are already safe from the Safari vulnerability since the "Open Safe Files" option was already the source of another vulnerability a while back.
By the time these vulnerabilities make it into the virus definitions, they are old hat. Plus, at least one *cough* Norton *cough* anti-virus for the Mac actually introduces a considerable number of new security vulnerabilities to the OS.
Sure, running anti-virus software on our machines will catch all those old Windows exploits but I'm not compromising my system to protect somebody else who didn't bother taking steps to protect their own machine... sorry.
If/When we start to see a critical mass of malicious viruses, trojans, or other malware targeted at the Mac that aren't stopped by common sense practices, then I'll look into Anti-Virus software... no sooner. Yeah, perhaps there's some risk in doing that, but far less risk than with running anti-virus software right now.
It's never been that (at least for most people). The advantage of Mac OS X is that it is less vulnerable than Windows (making Windows an easier target), and that Apple made decisions in the design process that mean that the typical consequences of a flaw are less severe. In recent years, Microsoft has attempted to harden Windows further and reduce their exposure - in W2K3 Server, for instance, they've done a pretty good job of it.
Even if Apple magically pulls some sort of super OS-jujitsu that reverses their market share and Microsoft's, the basic architecture will stay the same underneath - and that means Apple will have their relative advantages intact for the foreseeable future. Windows is, as its heart, an OS that has traded off many security options for ease of access and ease of programming. Apple had the advantage of seeing what was already happening to Windows when they made their decisions about how OS X would be designed, plus the system it was derived from was pretty robust to begin with.
There will be viruses that attack Mac OS X. Some will do a pretty good job of attacking. I'm kind of surprised it's taken this long to get there. But I'm also not expecting it ever to compare to Windows in that regard.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
How hard would it be to convince some average uses that the worm/virus/trojan that they're downloading is actually an amazing tool to "tweak" some aspect of their computer's performance (internet/speed/ram/etc...)?
The difference between the security hole approach and the social engineering approach, is that the latter starts and ends with stupid users. The worm cannot force its way onto the computers of more savy users like the RPC worms in Windows did. Instead, it will set off a huge number of warning flags with more experienced users, and perhaps prompt them to take action to clean other user's computers or encourage them not to run anything that asks for their password.
The end result is that such viruses could not spread as fast or as far as their Windows counterparts.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The situation just isn't as simple as you believe it to be. Sure, the number of people who use an operating system tends to have a relation to the number of people who develop for that system and also the number who have the skills necessary to create a virus, trojan, or worm. But there's more to it than that. Windows, although it's getting better, and hopefully Vista will be much better, has architectural issues that make it easier to exploit. It also has consumer-targeted development tools which have the sole intention of lowering the bar to new programmers. Combine these two, and you have a societal petrie dish ripe for creating malware authors - not only are there more people using the OS, but there are proportionately more people capable of writing malicious software and a system that is easier to exploit.
If the Mac had 95% market share, there would certainly be more malware, but the situation would simply not be as bad as it is for Windows right now.
yep, the last exploit relies on people to be morons and try to open an apparent 'picture' from a random spammer, or a strange website/whatever. Which could happen with any OS. Except if the user isn't running with full admin priveleges then they are going to be fine anyway..
which is totally what she said
The reason why no one writes viruses for Apple is most likely because people like Apple and want them to succeed.
Considering that the main incentive for virus writers these days seems to be economic (profitable criminal activity such as spamming, phishing, DDOS blackmail, identity fraud), it seems unlikely to me that these criminals care if Apple succeeds. More likely, the profit motive isn't there, probably a result the combination of greater security on OSX, and smaller installed base.
Running anti-virus software is a stupid thing to do when you can FIX the system instead.
What's the phrase? There is no patch for human stupidity?
Go ahead, be smug about it. But the bottom line is that as Mac becomes more popular you're going to have idiots who are going to let thing thru simply because they don't understand what they're doing. Do you really think that Windows user who keep their systems up to date and use a bit of common sense are the ones you're reading about? Windows is insecure in a lot of aspects, sure, but a Windows user with a dose of common sense and some knowhow aren't suffering as much as the normal MS bashing article here would have you think.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Granted it's a trojan, but it's a Trojan that is being passed virally... ie: once downloaded by the first ignoramus, it attempts to re-distribute itself via Address Book (the equivalent of Outlooks contact list) and iChat (IM messenger app with hooks into AOL, .Mac and Netscape) whereby it becomes a virally transmitted trojan so that other victims can proceed to clicky-click it, thinking it is from a trusted source and thereby starting the process over... with their Address Book of targets...
Pretty nasty IMHO... I've turned on 'view all extension' and recommend all Mac users do the same until a patch is released (which I think should be as simple as a 'binary flag' or something similar that identifies an executable regardless of it's name, icon, extension or whatever... AND to buy or reimplement "Little Snitch" which is an awesome tool for letting you know when something is trying to access an outgoing port and gives you the option of allowing or denying it.... it may not stop you from getting a virus/worm but it will help you become aware of it and give you the option of containing it.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Now is it right for me to say that my linux computers are more secure just because they are running linux? No, that's stupid.
.NET does solve buffer overruns (unless you make any calls into Win32 or other C code, which Microsoft makes unnecessarily difficult to do correctly), but it pushes threads even harder. Secure software has to be correct, and threaded correct software is an oxymoron. Now you've got race conditions. The only race condition I usually have to worry about in a typical Unix software package is use of tmpnam() (and every time anyone compiles a piece of software, they get warned about it).
It's not that Linux is secure. It's that Windows is *insecure*.
Microsoft had a long period (perhaps over?) where they introduced *horribly* insecure designs -- making decisions that completely ignored security in the name of any shred of functionality that they might gain. (And those designs still affect us today.) Double-click execution of executables in email, using their full-blown web browser to view emails (which escallated any security hole in a web browser into a worm-class bug), default of no Administrator password on NT, default share all drives (but make them "invisible" to other Windows machines), design a windowing API that essentially makes local security on a computer impossible, have a system where each file has many names (which makes it damned difficult to write a secure server), encourage people to use threads (because their OS lacked copy-on-write), omit the ability to create chroot jails from their OS, run all kinds of servers by default (remember Messenger Service and the spam that you *knew* was going to happen?) allowing IP-baed access and then proceed to blame sysadmins for not firewalling Windows boxes because Win machines weren't usable out of box on the Internet, bundle telnet but not ssh, and so forth.
Hmm...other goodies. POSIX places hard bounds on what calls do. Microsoft provides MSDN, which provides some examples and no guarantees. It's a tutorial, not a spec. Writing secure software when you don't have guarantees on *exactly* what a call can do or will do in future revisions of the OS is damned impossible. Because Windows isn't a very usable multi-user machine, software authors essentially ignored local security for years -- most Windows software can be attacked every way to Sunday locally (though I'll grant that this wasn't directly MS's fault). There are local security vulnerabilities in Unix software as well, but people actually *care* about them and fix them if they can find them, and don't just introduce them without a care in the world.
Secure software is correct software, and because Windows tries to guarantee binary compatibility and there is only one Windows, developers don't often look up the spec (when I code serious software under Linux, I have the C99 spec in one window and the POSIX spec in the other). It's just a matter of "well, I've passed in this invalid value and it seems to work, and it'll probably keep going". That drives me nuts. Try saying that on comp.unix.programmer, and you'll discover a higher standard.
And MS is still doing it. Okay,
Now, Microsoft provides lots of security *administration* tools. They provide a sophisticated (I'd even argue overcomplicated -- in the vein of VMS, the problem is not a lack of controls, but in users not understanding the system fully) ACL system. The rules for what exactly happens with permissions when copying files around are bonkers. Sure, most users don't care, but if you're trying to write a system that doesn't have security holes, it's a royal pain in the ass. If it takes a ton of work to figure out and write something properly, developers will just stuff a maximally-permissive ACL on something -- under Unix, you have exactly 12 bits and an owner and group to worry about, and there's the extent of your permission system.
But the problem isn't a lack of frontends and tools. It's the coding and design practices, and that's just ha
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I haven't seen any compelling evidence that Linux or MacOS X are more secure than Windows is against the twin threats of malicious software and badly trained users. They're all based on similar security ideas, which just don't cut the mustard. A better security model does exist, but it's not implemented in any desktop operating system today.
Agreed: If you want Mac malware, you have to go to a store and buy it.
It's completely unacceptable that Slashdot editors would post this garbage. From the referenced article:
"In the past two weeks, information-security companies like Symantec Inc., Sophos PLC and McAfee Inc. have identified several security issues related to the latest version of Apple's Mac operating system, called OS X. Among the concerns: two "worms," programs written by unknown hackers that were designed to spread themselves to other Macs through Apple's iChat instant-messaging software and Bluetooth wireless-communications capability."
Translation: Some public relations drone, with no technical knowledge, paid the Wall Street Journal to post the article. The Wall Street Journal is a "What the rich want you to think" publication, and, in my experience, usually unreliable for anything useful. Note that the article jumps from subject to subject rapidly, apparently to hide the fact that there are no actual incidents of Mac infections to report.
Another translation: Symantec, a maker of very buggy security software of poor design, and other "security" companies want Mac users to buy their products.
Some people, in my opinion, spend their entire working lives being dishonest, trying to trick other people. In my experience some of them work for WSJ.
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Cheney's company is rapidly building prisons for the U.S. government.
The guy who wrote this article doesn't know what he's talking about. "Worms" spread without any user interaction -- they can infect millions of machines on the internet in hours. Those are the kind of vulnerabilities that got Microsoft in trouble in 2003. Viruses require user interaction to work. All the "vulnerabilities" described in the article require the user to install a program and it's trivially easy to be destructive once you have the user's trust.
In addition, virtually all the vulnerabilities described by the article are local ones -- meaning a malicious person needs access to the machine. Truly dangerous vulnerabilities offer remote access, which means any random hacker on the Internet can control the machine from afar. AFAIK, none have been discovered in most Linux distributions or OS X. If OS X did ship with remote vulnerabilities, THAT would be huge news.
The only relevant part of the article comes at the very end:
Many viruses and worms, for instance, don't exploit security holes in operating systems. Instead, they use what are called "social engineering" techniques to trick users into doing things that they shouldn't do, like unwittingly installing programs. The Anna Kournikova worm from 2001, for example, infamously tricked Windows users into installing it by masquerading as photos of the leggy Russian tennis star attached to e-mails.
Rather than weaknesses in operating systems, such approaches exploit "a bug in peoples' brains, which is much harder to patch," Mr. Cluley says.
That should have been the lead. The rest of the article is idiotic.