Apple Usurps Oracle As the Biggest Threat To PC Security

AmiMoJo writes: According to data from Secunia, Apple's software for Windows is now the biggest threat to PC security, surpassing previous long term champion Java. Among U.S. users, some 61 percent of computers detected running QuickTime did not have the latest version. With iTunes, 47 percent of the installations were outdated versions. There were 18 vulnerabilities in Apple QuickTime 7 at the time of the study. Oracle has now fallen/risen to 2nd place, followed by Adobe. All three vendors bundle automatic updater utilities with their software, but users seem to be declining new versions. Update fatigue, perhaps?

Comments

Annoying update process

[fintux]

The reason why I'm stalling sometimes with the updates is that the whole process is interfering with my computer usage. There are annoying popups requiring attention at about 30 s - 1 min intervals, activating a random time after computer boot and trying to install 3rd party software, so I need to be in a mood for installing those updates. Not even to mention that every software has its own update software with its quirks. And Windows also now notifies you to disable "unnecessary" start up software, which often includes these update checkers. These should all come from a single source and be handled much more like they are handled in Linux distributions or mobile app stores.

Not fatigue

[Anonymous Coward]

I was so excited when I got my iPhone 4. It's old, I know. Everything worked so well.

Now... itunes has changed so much I can barely use it. It's always losing playlists, stopping play because it sees a cloud icon when the downloaded version is right underneath it, etc. Don't get me started about the hidden File Edit menus. My iphone barely works anymore. Browsers slow, maps is a joke, switching tasks takes a while.

The last thing in the world I want to do is update itunes and IOS. Each time it gets more and more unusable, each time the experience stops 'just working'. I won't upgrade either again. Too scared. Too much time to remake all those playlists. Too worried about the lag from the new OS or insanely strange UI of itunes.

It's too bad we can't just stick with a version that works, but this 'one size fits all' approach isn't working great.

Re: It's a business opportunity!

[John Allsup]

If the vendor has not managed to produce a properly written, secure, bug free piece of software by the 10th attempt, what faith should one have in the 11th. Software updates have lead to bloat, bug tolerance and laziness. If vendors were required to ship working software, rather than anything they liked, we would have less software, but far less low quality software. Oracle, Apple and Adobe have some amazingly well written code lurking in their products, but it is buried under tons of bloated rubbish that should never have been considered fit to release.

Re:It's a business opportunity!

[Bert64]

The problem is the "updaters", and these only exist because windows doesn't provide a centralised update system for applications to hook into.

You end up with a load of background updater processes wasting resources at all times, so they end up getting turned off.
And because the update process happens in userland, unprivileged users (ie most corporate installs) cannot apply the updates or run the updater.
Most corporate deployments won't update these applications centrally because doing so is a painful process.

Re:Users View Updates from Apple as Risky

[upuv]

I have to completely agree.

Apple software installs effectively trash your carefully configured machine. How many WTF moments have I had just after a simple update and realise that my personal content has now magically moved. To where? Pictures and Videos I take of the family all of a sudden are assimilated into the Apple sphere. My preferences for video audio, homepage, picture, editing etc all trashed.

And in most case it's damn near impossible to remove. Thus being relegated to un-used software that is slowly dying in a dark corner of the hard-drive.

I'll be that guy

[phishybongwaters]

I'm gonna go ahead and call this flamebait. I'm no fan of Apple but that's more about their business practices and less about the quality of their hardware and software... but I'm struggling to blame Apple for people not keeping quicktime updated. Who the F@CK uses quicktime? I know back to the future day has passed, so clearly we aren't travelling back to 1998, so wtf is quicktime even doing on most peoples machines?

Re: It's a business opportunity!

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is fucking great until someone takes over your privileged service that's running in the background.

Re: It's a business opportunity!

[TheRaven64]

If the vendor has not managed to produce a properly written, secure, bug free piece of software by the 10th attempt, what faith should one have in the 11th

Name one piece of software that is over 50,000 lines of code and is bug free after any number of attempts.

If vendors were required to ship working software, rather than anything they liked, we would have less software, but far less low quality software

We would have far less software. seL4 is the most complex piece of formally verified code and is around 10,000 lines of code. NICTA estimates that the cost of developing it is around 30 times the cost of developing the equivalent software with best-practice feature and regression testing and code review. The cost of making a nontrivial modification to seL4 is almost as great as the cost of writing it in the first place.

Oh, and when seL4 was open sourced, it took under 24 hours before someone found an exploitable security hole in it, because their formal verification hadn't verified the property that the attacker was looking for.