31–40 of 158 posts
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Google is getting in to the OS business. I suspect this is as much about dogfood as security, but hammering on security is instant bad press for Microsoft.
Well Google is also competing with Apple's OS business. The bigger point is that Windows doesn't offer users any advantage over Linux or OS X anymore. Its not like the old days when Windows had the most applications and driver support.
so what happens when an exploit other than IE is used in the future when something goes down at Google? Seems like a decision taken in haste and more of a knee-jerk reaction.
That's why they're ditching not IE but windows altogether. Doesn't seem knee-jerk to me when you look at the security track record of the various platforms.
I'd provide a link to hard data, but for some reason Secunia's taken down their list of unpatched vulnerabilities in OS X (?!), even though they provide this data for most other operating systems, including Windows.
How do they test Chrome for Windows?
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I would agree. Windows has the largest population of non-computer literate people worldwide so hackers get the bigest bang for their buck and windows gets a bad rap. If everyone jumps to another OS so will the security problems.
?! Are you missing the part where OS X is based on BSD?
So, to a good approximation, you can say that the command line is based on BSD, and the rest came from NeXT and Apple, with a bit of GNU mixed in.
The BSD heritage is rather insignificant when it comes to security, since the largest attack surface comes from Apple applications like Safari, or the file manager, or other apps the end user uses directly on a regular basis.
"Many people have been moved away from [Windows] PCs, mostly towards Mac OS, following the China hacking attacks" Wait, so they're phasing out Windows for security reasons, and moving to Mac instead? It at least made sense when they were moving to Linux or ChromeOS, but OS X's security track record as of late is far worse than Windows.
Citation? I haven't seen anything near the equivalent of Windows flaws on OS X. How many remotely exploitable OS X vulnerabilities have there been in the last 2 years?
Mac isn't significantly more secure. In fact, after all the bad press, Microsoft has invested significant amounts of money on intrusion mitigation systems like address space randomization, non-executable stacks, and so on. Linux is playing catch up to Windows in some regards there, and from what I know about OSX, it's also far behind in intrusion mitigation techniques. (edit: here's a blog post that covers some of them: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michael_howard/archive/2006/05/26/ad...)
There are perfectly good reasons for switching to OSX (like, for example, the fact that the interface isn't a pain to use, and the command line doesn't suck, although I still favor Linux with a good tiling WM), but I don't think security is a valid one.
"Many people have been moved away from [Windows] PCs, mostly towards Mac OS, following the China hacking attacks" Wait, so they're phasing out Windows for security reasons, and moving to Mac instead? It at least made sense when they were moving to Linux or ChromeOS, but OS X's security track record as of late is far worse than Windows.
I would agree. Windows has the largest population of non-computer literate people worldwide so hackers get the bigest bang for their buck and windows gets a bad rap. If everyone jumps to another OS so will the security problems.
Popularity is unrelated to quality of code.
While it is true that popularity = bigger target = more incentive to attack the platform's security, it is also often used as an excuse to try to hand-wave away bad, insecure code.
Another platform becoming more popular would indeed mean that it would have more people targeting it. But it does not, in any way, mean that the people would have the same level of success exploiting it as they do Windows.
We could probably safely expect that the platform would be successfully exploited more than it currently is. And people that think OS X is a security panacea are living in a fantasy world. But the argument that "[i]f everyone jumps to another OS so will the security problems" is a woeful oversimplification, and confuses two separate issues.
Also, as a side note, people seriously underestimate the level of incentive that currently exists for targeting non-Windows platforms. It is not the case that the incentive scales proportionally to audience size. Any sufficiently popular platform is a desirable target to attack. It's not like a platform has to have 90% of the market to be worth the effort. The relative ease of attack is a far more important factor than the potential audience size once we're talking millions of users.
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Citation? I haven't seen anything near the equivalent of Windows flaws on OS X. How many remotely exploitable OS X vulnerabilities have there been in the last 2 years?
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9129978/Researcher_cr... Mac isn't significantly more secure. In fact, after all the bad press, Microsoft has invested significant amounts of money on intrusion mitigation systems like address space randomization, non-executable stacks, and so on. Linux is playing catch up to Windows in some regards there, and from what I know about OSX, it's also far behind in intrusion mitigat…
You liked to an article that says "there once existed a vulnerability in Safari" and then right away claimed that Linux and OSX are "still catching up to" Windows in terms of security. Now, I want to believe you, but it sounds to me like you're speaking with a little too much conviction relative to the evidence you're presenting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Citation? I haven't seen anything near the equivalent of Windows flaws on OS X. How many remotely exploitable OS X vulnerabilities have there been in the last 2 years?
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9129978/Researcher_cr... Mac isn't significantly more secure. In fact, after all the bad press, Microsoft has invested significant amounts of money on intrusion mitigation systems like address space randomization, non-executable stacks, and so on. Linux is playing catch up to Windows in some regards there, and from what I know about OSX, it's also far behind in intrusion mitigat…
MacOS -- and I say this as a long-time user, since the System 6 days, and as an OS atheist -- only seems to have a better security track record in the minds of users because it hasn't been targeted anywhere near as much as Windows has.
As far as Google is concerned, they may just be banking on security-through-obscurity. Use a system that the bad guys aren't familiar with exploiting, and you're less likely to be exploited.