Microsoft Could Teach Apple a Lesson about Security

[djbaxter]

Microsoft Could Teach Apple a Lesson about Security
by Preston Gralla, Computerworld
Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Apple is very slow at fixing security problems with Mac OS X. Two of the security problems were big ones, uncovered in March at the "Pwn2Own" annual hacking contest sponsored by 3Com's TippingPoint. Waiting two months to fix the problems is simply too long. On March 27, Mozilla fixed the security problem found with Firefox. And it turns out that the version of Internet Explorer 8 hacked at the conference wasn't final, and the final version of IE 8 wasn't vulnerable.

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According to Computerworld, many of the patches were related to Open Source applications or components integrated with Mac OS X, such as Apache Web server and the WebKit browser rendering engine. Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security, said that he had seen patches for those security holes issued for Linux nearly half a year ago in December. Yet Apple waited until May to fix them.

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For a long time, there's been a myth that Macs are invulnerable to hacks, Trojans, and other dangers. That's certainly not the case. Recently, for example, a Trojan was found to infect Macs and created a botnet. In addition, several security researchers have said that Macs are less secure than Windows or Linux.

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See also Mac OS X Update Hiccups Rile the Mac Faithful - PC World