Category: Compgeeky

While the Mac platform has never been truly free of malware, with the Apple platforms (Yeh, multiple: iOS and Mac) finally attaining a market penetration that makes it worth malware creators’ time and effort, real people are now seeing real malware problems more frequently on Apple platformed devices, specifically on Macs, for the most part. The recent flap about the Flashback Trojan has led knowledgeable folks such as Kapersky’s Roul Schouwenberg to observe,

“Percentage-wise, Flashback is roughly the equivalent of Conficker,” referring to the multi-vector Conficker Worm that created such a stir in 2008-2009.

Of course, Conficker on Windows computers spread for pretty much the same reason that Flashback recently spread on Macs: OS manufacturers who were slow to patch their OSes and lazy, careless users–often truly clueless naifs–who aided in the spread of the malware. And as long as Apple continues to support the idea that Macs are essentially bulletproof, the cluelessness among Mac users will persist.

But what of iOS? From a February CNet article,

Scanning hundreds of thousands of applications across the mobile landscape for its 2011 Mobile Threats Report, Juniper uncovered more than 28,000 pieces of malware last year, a rise of 155 percent from 2010.

As expected, Android was the post popular target.

Malware aimed at Google’s mobile OS surged to 13,000 samples at the end of last year

I’ll let you decide how toi do the math on that one, ‘K? 28,000 malware apps-13,000 Android malware apps leaves how much malware to divide up between Java and iOS? Recall the anti-malware patch for iOS last Fall? Just sayin’.

Of course, I don’t run any OS from The Evil Empire (do your own search for the term; it’s all over the place *heh*), but I do run a number of other OSes–some just for the fun of it–ranging from various Windows versions to various flavors of ‘nixes, and even including one Android device with its own customized front end (the Kindle Fire). All of them run with up-to-date anti-malware installed. Yes, even the BSD Unix-based compouter that uses the same Unix code base that Apple’s OSX uses (only pure Unix, instead of the bastardized thing Apple’s made of OSX). Modern anti-malware doesn’t have to exact the performance hit that early anti-malware all too often did, and wearing belt (keeping the OS properly patched) and suspenders (up-to-date anti-malware) is both easy to do and a commonsense no-brainer. Not that one would get that impression from most Mac users I know… (Not that I know all that many, since apart from iOS users–still a minority of cell phone and even tablet users around here–Apple has little penetration in America’s Third World County where people often have better things to waste their money on than kewl komputerz from The Evil Empire. *heh*)

We’ll see how this all plays out. Will Apple do the adult thing here and step up, admitting it’s not bulletproof, or will it stonewall and continue the “delayed update response” to threats as it has in the past (*cough* MacDefender *cough*) until compelled to respond to real world threats?

Based on Apple’s long and well displayed arrogance I’m betting on the latter. At least Apple is promising to include better anti-malware in upcoming versions and perhaps even updates to OS X (search Mac Gatekeeper). We’ll just have to wait and see. At least Apple’s promise of better built-in anti-malware is a tacet* admission of the problem.

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BTW, for Mac users who do have their heads out of their keisters, here’s an article on commonsense steps to take.

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Keep in mind, the installed base of Windows computers is somewhere north of a billion, while the threshold of increased appeal for malware creators targeting Mac computers is minuscule by comparison, given that Apple’s “huge” penetration of the desktop/notebook market is now about 63 million Mac OS X users. ‘nix boxes aren’t even on the radar with only about 1% of the desktop/notebook market (although the server and embedded segments are a far, far different story; your router, for example, is probably running Linux or some other ‘nix variant).

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*No, I didn’t misspell “tacit”. “Tacet” is a musical term that means something similar to “tacit” but contains much more content, as a “tacet” passage for an instrument or voice is one of directed silence for a much longer term–frequently a whole passage or movement–than would be convenient to note simply with rests.