See what happens when a OS gets popular and actually has people trying to crack it?
“There is no magic fairy dust protecting Macs”
they primary reason mac’s are overlooked by virus creators is because windows owns the market share.
yup. Its only a matter of time. Everybody knew it. Even mac users. Except they just deny it.
:tif:
My personal experience with this matter…One of the most targeted sites on the internet decided to run MacOS X Server for their webserver.
MacOSX is built on BSD which has been around longer then Windows…it is also based on opensource which tends to have more bugs found and fixed.
I guess if you really wanted to compare security between windows and macosx you could look at the STIGs(Security Technical Implementation Guide) put out by the NSA/DoD…
Actually… although the potential for virus’s are there, there are still only 3 viruses, and… they were not OS level, but a packed program that was installed on the computer. It looks to me like Macs are still about … ohh… a couple million times safer than a PC :tup:
A lot different stuff came up then a pirated copy of iWorks with a remote exploit in it. They are talking about actual virus and worm problems in Macs which are the same problems that plague Windows users.
Like people said, as Macs become more mainstream and people think they are the virus and spyware free systems, hackers will take advantage of this. Its only a matter of time.
Apparently, this time, what happens in Vegas is not staying there, and the 4,000 “security professionals” (including hackers) who are attending the conference discussed the hacks and viruses that could end up making Macs just as vulnerable as Windows-based machines, if the bad guys start paying more attention to them. In fact, they said, Macs could be more vulnerable, because they have more code to potentially exploit.
Well becuase there is still limited tools out there. Any script kiddie can grab a C++ program and take down a Windows PC pretty easily. There isnt forums full of programs that exploit OSX yet but the article and presentations are talking about that hackers have set their sights on Mac and identified problems and exploits in the system.
Isnt BSD open source but Apple re licenses its system as a closed source BSD system when it built its OS? I thought this led to the OSX system having its own security updates and requires Apple to patch instead of a BSD community coder.
Actually it’s pretty hard to hack someones personal PC remotely…
The threat surface is very limited.
Everyones home machine is NATed and Windows/MacOSX both have firewalls…Also both operating systems have fairly mature TCP/IP stacks.
Which leaves you with
- Making the user download/run something
- XSS/Visiting some malicious site
- Being on the same private network.
- 3rd party applications vulns that accept incoming traffic.
- This goes with 1,2 3rd party apps like Adobe or Flash in the case of Windows but you still have to visit and or run something.
I know there have been local privilege escalations for MacOSX but again you would need physical access or VNC access…But if they are already at that point you deserve to be owned.
A lot of what fucks windows over in security is legacy support LM hashes and support for Windows 2000.
But otherwise how would blue eyed devil go on nyspeed? :lol:
HA
I hate that quote “it’s only a matter of time”. The truth is, Macs have been VERY popular for the past 10 years now, ever since OSX came out, and before that, they were the most popular computer of schools and universities for 10+ years.
Hackers don’t wait until the right time to strike, and then do it, they hack what they can, when they can. They just have not been able to do it yet, simple as that. And as soon as they can, it will just get patched. Having robust file permissions is nice :tup:
:picard:
Define VERY popular? If 8 out of every 100 people liked me (this year), I wouldn’t consider myself popular. Mac owns 8% of the computer share now. It went up 3% last year and less than that the year before. When 3 out of every 100 computers is running a OS, there is ZERO interest in exploiting it and taking advantage of it.
Second, the right time means they need to see some value in it outside of the people who just try to hack something just becuase or to gain information on it. By “hack” we are refering to worms and exploits that turn Windows PC’s into botnets and such. Not someone getting in and getting all your porn files. Saying that, botnets being one of the most common result of worms, they are very powerful and have tons of functions. They can be sold, used for DDoS attacks at will, etc. Also, since they rely on a simple exploit in a system process, they are easy to write the hack for.
Its not about “the right time”, its about the right reason and return on investment. Why write a worm that can infect (just this year) 8 of every 100 PCs out there when you can focus your attention to a Windows based exploit that can be aimed at 90 out of 100 computers out there?
Because 8 out of 100 PCs is still an astronomically high number…
lol silly mac users still deny it
My dream mac virus would bring up a video of that arrogant little shit from the commercials that says “I’m a mac, and I’m dead.” Then fdisks your hard drive and flashes your EFI so you can’t boot. I’d be willing to contribute to its development.
:lol:
:tup to not calling it an Bios :tup:
OS X is largely a BSD based userspace although they did adapt some gnu stuff with Apples tools and frameworks built on top of it in there own directory Structure (namely /Applications, /Library, /User for home dir, /System) finder actually hides pretty much all of the normal unix userspace. Apple tools are rooted from NeXT (Jobs company after he left apple the first time) and there development of NeXTStep.
One key distinction between the BSD variants (Free, NET, Open and whatever else is the flavour of the month) is that Apple does not use the BSD kernel. The kernel is the XNU kernel initially developed by NeXT, althought it roots back to CMU developing Mach, and carried on by NeXTStep and continued by Apple.