Macs More Vulnerable Than Windows For Enterprise

sl4shd0rk writes "At a Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, researchers presented exploits on Apple's DHX authentication scheme which can compromise all connected Macs on the LAN within minutes. 'If we go into an enterprise with a Mac and run this tool we will have dozens or hundreds of passwords in minutes,' Stamos said. Macs are fine as long as you run them as little islands, but once you hook them up to each other, they become much less secure."

Comments

Re:All computers are less secure

[DrgnDancer]

It's also worth pointing out that the "exploits" for Macs these guys found require an amazing amount of stupidity on the part of the system/network admins. We're supposed to worried about using Macs in "Enterprise" level exploits, but the configuration required for exploiting is distinctly amateur.

They claim DHX is vulnerable, Kerberos is not; but it's "trivial" to change the scheme. This is true if you have root on the server box, but getting there should not be "trivial" in the first place. Even with DHX, you need to get admin privileges on a workstation box to start sniffing passwords. Again, that shouldn't be trivial in the first place. Admin accounts should only belong to trained administrative users, whether your OS is Windows, MacOS, or Linux. Sure, if you make every Tom, Dick, and Sue an admin you're highly vulnerable to social engineering attacks. On any OS. OSX permits and encourages privilege separation like any other OS; if you chose not to use it, you're an idiot, not "Enterprise IT".

A competently administered Mac network, with proper encryption, privileged separation, threat training , etc should be no more vulnerable than any other if I'm reading this right (I read the slides form the presentation in addition to the almost useless article). The take home point shouldn't be "Don't use Macs", it should be "Treat Macs like every other client and server." They're not more vulnerable, they're just not full of magic hacker repelling pixie dust.