Posted on 07/22/2010 7:40:23 AM PDT by for-q-clinton
Here's another blow to those insist that Apple products are rock solid and unhackable: The security company Secunia reports that Apple products have more vulnerabilities than those of any other company. Oracle came in second place, with Microsoft in third.
Secunia just issued a report that covers vulnerabilities for the first half of 2010, and it's not good news for Apple. The report (which you can download here) shows that Apple last had the most vulnerabilities of all vendors in 2005, before Oracle took over the top spot. And now Apple is on top again. You can see the chart, below.
The chart shows that Apple products consistently have more vulnerabilities than do Microsoft ones.
...
However, there will certainly be one surprise for those who believe that Microsoft products are particularly vulnerable --- Secunia reports that they're not. The primary vulnerabilities on PCs are not due to Microsoft programs, but rather third-party programs, it says:
...
The report then concludes:
Users and businesses must change their perception that Microsoft products pose the largest threat in order to allocate security resources effectively. General awareness on the risk of 3rd party programs must be established.
(Excerpt) Read more at pcworld.com ...
I know experience has told me that all Systems are vulnerable. And with Microsoft having over 90% of the PC market you think they'd be #1, but reality is they have really learned a lot from being the top dog and have really improved security.
If Apple ever gets a decent market share with Macs they'll need to learn quickly or their secure reputation will tank. Instead of marketing security they should have been fixing things and working on improving thier code and architecture.
Pawn2Own has proven 3 years in a row that OSX is the easiest/quickest to hack.
OS X has been getting attention for years. Nothing effective in the wild yet. Why would hackers bother to exploit software with a vulnerable population of 12,000, yet ignore 50+ million Mac users? That's a lot of machines out there, waiting to become a rather large botnet if they are that insecure.
Becuase 95% > 5%.
When simply counting numbers, it makes no distinction between "wide open, gaping hole that lets a remote user take over your entire machine" and "may be able to read private data if the attacker has already gained access to the machine". But those are radically different security threats.
Oh, and this is a laugher, too:
The primary vulnerabilities on PCs are not due to Microsoft programs, but rather third-party programsBut those third party programs are exposing holes in the underlying OS protection. Besides, it also fails to note that most Mac "vulnerabilities" are due to the third-party BSD Unix system that Mac OS X is built on, many of which's utilities are rarely, if ever, used by most desktop users.
hey, look, I found an article too: Socialism IS better than capitalism: http://thisiscommunism.org/speech.htm
Odd...in real world experience, my article doesn’t seem to reflect reality...
Secunia isn’t biased in the way that, say, Rob Enderle is seriously biased against Linux. The problem with Secunia is not so much them, but the misinterpretation of the raw numbers that don’t necessarily have a correlation to real-world security.
Because 5% of a big number is still a big number.
How is this possible...Ive been hearing from Mac Freepers all these years that Apple is God’s machine (sarc/)
This is impossible because the Evil Empire is Headquartered in Redmond.
I guess we just see that differently. And will have to agree to disagree. I think 5% is very small relatively speaking and you don't. Not much we can do to overcome that disagreement.
And a lot bigger than 0.5%. Many a virus has been created for client systems with an installed base number 10's of thousands, but somehow a system with an installed base numbering well over 10 million is safe via "security through obscurity"?
“What a load. Experience tells otherwise.”
Exactly! My Etch-A-Sketch has never been hacked, and I use it all the time in starbucks!
Therefore, with my argument, my Etch-A-Sketch is better than your Mac.
Oh, and “Bob’s OS” is the most secure. It has never been hacked. Nevermind that Bob is the only person using his OS, it has 100% reliability.
All kidding aside, I’m not sure which OS is more secure. I don’t really care, I ran apple products up to the mid 80’s when IBM compatibles took over the market place due to more software available, and the open end system. Lotus 123 was the changing point for us.
I love being able to customize my system, build new systems, and I like the broad variety of software available to my PC. And I have never been the victim of a virus. Oh yeah, I don’t hang out on porn sites or other nefarious sites.
My kid uses Windows as well, but he’s a teen, and we’ve had to wipe his system a few times. Not really an issue, we know he’s young, we know he probably visits more high-risk sites, we know he downloads every app he can get his hands on, opens every email that comes along, but at the same time, he has nothing of value on his system other than his games, so its no biggie, he doesn’t even back up his system.
We have had a Mac in the house for a few years now, but it sits idle, except when our girls want to surf the web and the other computers are in use. We don’t use it for business, because the standard is Excel and Word, and all our forms must be submitted in these formats.
Oh yeah, the pricetag too. I can build a PC at home for a fraction of the cost of buying a pre-made PC, and at a fraction of a fraction (is there such a thing?) of what I can buy an Apple for.
If Apple ever became the standard that most folks would use, and the price dropped, and I could tinker with them, build them from scratch, and get all the software I needed, I would switch.
Safari is 3rd party? I thought Apple created Safari For three years in a row Safari has led to OSX being the first machine hacked in the pawn2own contest. I guess if that's 3rd party IE must be 3rd party for windows as well.
It is small relatively speaking. What you forget is that it is still a very large number.
Not much we can do to overcome that disagreement.
No, because you are doing it from the point of view of not wanting Macs to be inherently secure. It would mess up your world view.
So tell me this one thing: Why did OS 8 and 9 have effective viruses in the wild when they were far below a 5% marketshare and far below the current installed base of over 50 million OS X machines?
Every Mac OS X vulnerability is in Safari? Glad I use Firefox instead. (For the record, I use OS X, Windows XP, and Fedora Core 11 on different machines, but all of them run Firefox and Open Office as my primary applications.)
Link to viruses written for a system that only has .5% of the install base.
Obviously it will depend on what type of virus we are talking about and how big the security hole is. I’m not saying OSX is complete rubbish. It does have decent security; however, it’s not fool proof. Most viruses today require user interaction and for that you will either target an individual that you want to trick or you will target the masses.
Writing such a virus for the Mac obviously isn’t worth the effort (yet) even though we know they exist as proven by the pawn2own contest having OSX being the first one hacked 3 years in a row!
I'm pretty sure this article and the pawn2own conests have proven it's not inherently secure. The only thing that is in debate is why the virus writers haven't put much effort in attacking OS X.
I say it's because it's too small of a footprint and is secure enough to keep their efforts at exploit limited to the dumb users. For those attacks it's best to focus on the >90% of the market.
I'm not sure what you're saying though. You are saying it's inherently secure when we know that's not true based on pawn2own and this article detaling all the holes in the system.
So Safari is 3rd party or not?
... only because Charlie Miller is better at weaponizing his exploits than the people who were going after other systems. He is able to package an exploit so that it can be deployed in seconds. The guy is good.
Real world: There has not been one successful self-replicating pice of malware in the wild for nine years of OS X. There have been many attempts, but the best we've seen is supposedly pirated software downloaded from P2P sites that contained malware that required the user's permission to run.
Whatever the reason, be it architecture or some supposed obscurity, the real world fact is that you are safer on a Mac.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.