Microsoft: Macs 'Not Safe From Malware, Attacks Will Increase'

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft researchers have analyzed a new piece of Mac malware that uses a multi-stage attack similar to typical Windows malware infection routines. In a post titled 'An interesting case of Mac OSX malware' the Microsoft Malware Protection Center closed with this statement: 'In conclusion, we can see that Mac OSX is not safe from malware. Statistically speaking, as this operating system gains in consumer usage, attacks on the platform will increase. Exploiting Mac OSX is not much different from other operating systems. Even though Mac OSX has introduced many mitigation technologies to reduce risk, your protection against security vulnerabilities has a direct correlation with updating installed applications.'"

Comments

Not really surprising

[TheRaven64]

Possibly a biased source, but not exactly a shocking conclusion. The OS X kernel is a massive amount of C and embedded C++ code. On top of that is a huge pile more code. It's not going to be bug free, and at least some of those bugs will be exploitable. It does about the same set of things as other modern operating systems to reduce the damage that a compromised application can do (e.g. making it easy to run apps in sandboxes), but any network-exposed system running arbitrary code is vulnerable, the only question is whether the effort involved in finding and exploiting a vulnerability is greater than the reward.

user-friendly software deemed insecure, news at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe we need a new motto? You can have it easy to use, affordable or secure. Choose two.

Re:"Get the Facts"

[clang_jangle]

In before all the stupid replies that Linux cannot be hacked. :)

I suppose there could be some people stupid enough to say that, but I haven't seen much of it (unless you count obvious troll posts). In fact, a misconfigured linux system is one of the easiest to hack -- but we're discussing malware, not hacking. Since most linux distros are using repositories for all the third-party software (vs non-tech users zooming around the web downloading "10,000 similies!") malware for linux is pretty darned rare -- much more so than windows or os x. Unless, of course, one counts all the android trojans -- I don't because to me android is a completely unique OS that happens to use some linux code.