Macs May No Longer Be Immune to Viruses

Bill writes "MSNBC reports that the combination of Apple's growing market share and their recent switch to x86 processors has made Mac OS X a new target for viruses. Unfortunately, it seems that many Mac users are in denial. '[Computer security expert Tom] Ferris said he warned Apple of the vulnerabilities in January and February and that the company has yet to patch the holes, prompting him to compare the Cupertino-based computer maker to Microsoft three years ago, when the world's largest software company was criticized for being slow to respond to weaknesses in its products.'"

Comments

Gosh, it does sounds like MS.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Ouch. The description from secuania do sound like MS fumbles (mostly vulnerabilities in the way Safari handles multimedia files).

However, what sounds most MS-like was this:

Apple plans to patch the holes reported by Ferris in the next automatic update of Mac OS X, and there have been no reports of them being exploited, spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said. She disagreed that the vulnerabilities make it possible for a criminal to run code on a targeted machine.

Thanks Natalie, we'll take your word on it.

Re:Switch to Intel

[Illserve]

You are right that the Intel CPU won't itself make the mac more vulnerable, however the XP partition on a dual booting system might.

Assuming these two OS's just sit on different partitions of the same hard drive, any executable that compromises the XP half of the drive now has control over the entire computer, including the ability to install whatever it wants into the OS X side without requiring the user to enter their OS X root password. It wouldn't take that much ingenuity to design a virus that slips in through the XP door and delivers an OS X payload. It may have to mount the Mac file system, but that's hardly rocket science.

And I continue to be in denial...

[ShyGuy91284]

Since I have a G4 iBook, it is not x86 based, and viruses that target that will not target my iBook... *Plugs ears* I can't hear you. Universal binary virii will not happen.

Re:Switch to Intel

[Megane]

The Harvard architecture that the PowerPC uses is inherently more secure than x86.

I don't theen that word means what you theen it means. The PPC, all mainstream desktop microprocessors, uses a Von Neumann architecture.

And one problem I heard about long ago which it would have been nice if they had fixed was that the syscall mechanism ignores the second and third byte of the instruction word, rather than requiring them to be zero, which would make it more complicated for a buffer overflow to do anything really bad.

Luckily, all ICBMs ship with the hardware support.

Well then, that'll keep the Russians from launching against us by accident. (I know what you were trying to say, but I can't figure out what the heck the "B" stands for. And overloading acronyms doesn't make you funny anyhow.)