I don't see why this is discussed so much, afaik this article just says "Windows is more secure than OSX", mentions Mac Defender and goes on OSX about market share... The same story Mac users have heard for the last 10 years. Nothing new here, moving on, and remembering the days of Melissa, Kournikova, Sober, MyDoom etc...
OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
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Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
#32"The Unix Design is significantly less granular than Windows..." That's why it's more secure. Complexity means you don't know what's going on. Complexity means you will forget something. Complexity means there's more likely to be a way to squeeze through, more likely to be a bug, more likely to be a little thing that is forgotten. This is also a problem with complex cryptographic APIs, overly complicated things like…
Unix by far is not secure. Access control via unix permissions is a mess, this is why we have selinux, apparmor, smack... The whole 'complexity' argument is moot todays unix with selinux, chrooting, jails, apparmor is much more complex than say a capability based security.
Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
#33One point I would add is that by default, Macs have Perl, Python and Ruby (I think). So it's easy to script malware or write portable tools. I'm not suggesting that these languages are insecure or should not be installed, only that a malware designer can pretty much count on having them available to use. This may make Mac/Linux cross-platform malware easier as well.
Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
#34> A lot of OS X users seem to have this idea that Apple hired only the best of the best when it came to programmers while Microsoft hired the cheapest and barely adequately skilled... Is this really a commonly held belief? I've never encountered anyone expressing this opinion.
It’s possible some people might believe that, perhaps not HN readers But the quality of the management plays a very important role in the quality of the end result: Apples has Jobs and Microsoft has Ballmer. So Microsoft is at a disadvantage human-resource-wise.
Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
#35"The Unix Design is significantly less granular than Windows..." That's why it's more secure. Complexity means you don't know what's going on. Complexity means you will forget something. Complexity means there's more likely to be a way to squeeze through, more likely to be a bug, more likely to be a little thing that is forgotten. This is also a problem with complex cryptographic APIs, overly complicated things like…
I'm sorry but this is a horrible argument. Granular security is critical to having a system that can actually be locked down. Which is why SELinux support is built into the kernel now.
Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
#36I was struck by the part about the OSX ASLR implementation. I can't believe they only randomize library loads :-/.
Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
#37This is actually just the tip of the iceberg for OS X vulnerabilities.
On the enterprise side, it's much much worse. AFP is heinous. Their kerberos implementations are painful.
They actually have checkboxes in OS X server config screens that say: "Prevent man in the middle attacks? Yes or No?"
Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
#38So, let's review the actual exploits listed here (since, the author says, it isn't just FUD): ASLR & MacDefender... Hmm... hardly a damning criticism.
Agreed; follow the link the author offers near the top of the article to Secunia. Of a few common OSes I looked at (Red Hat Enterprise 5, Windows XP Pro, Windows 7, OS X), OS X had the fewest advisories for 2009, 2010, and 2011; most vulnerabilities seemed to be of a more benign nature than other OSes. Perfect? Probably not, but it's still the OS I'm going to recommend to my mom.
Apple has fewer advisories because it's their standard operating procedure to sit on security bugs for several months and then patch them all at once, even if their contemporaries are patching them as they appear.
If you look at the numbers for OS X as opposed to Windows XP, OS X has 1,544 vulnerabilities in 153 advisories (~10.1 vulns/advisory) and Windows has 472 vulnerabilities in 358 advisories (~1.31 vulns/advisory).
Unless you have a good reason to believe that bugs in Windows are nearly eight times "more unique" than bugs in OS X, please don't compare advisories.
Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
#39personal opinion about security is all well and good but they wont make you any more or less secure
either for what its worth osx really provides nothing impressive on the security front
Re: OS X – Safe, yet horribly insecure
#40personal opinion about security is all well and good but they wont make you any more or less secure
either for what its worth osx really provides nothing impressive on the security front but apple seems is however trying to catch up with everyone else it seems so that's good...
quicktime, itunes their pdf rendering system, how their updates are handled and now they respond to and treat security researchers .. I mean just look at the permissions on the binaries in your applications directory or plugins in ~/Library seriously?