The article said -- ""It probably took about 20 or 30 minutes to get root on the box. Initially I tried looking around the box for certain mis-configurations and other obvious things but then I decided to use some unpublished exploits -- of which there are a lot for Mac OS X," gwerdna told ZDNet Australia ."
I've had a Mac with the latest operating system running for months and months (years, actually) without any problems -- being online continuously with a high-speed Internet connection. That's the model I have at home. And then, I have a laptop model that I take out and use with all sorts of *other* Internet connections (all sorts of WiFi connections). And I use them both extensively.
I've noticed through the logs on the computer that I've got many different people hammering away at both machines, trying to break in. I see it all logged -- but no one can get in. I have the machines set up so I can access them both remotely, myself -- but no one else can.
So, they're both accessible by me -- but not others. And even with all the hammering away by all those others (from all over the place, from China to Korea, to Russia to you-name-it) -- there's no problem at all with me keeping the machines secure.
And no worries about any virus at all. The last time I saw any kind of virus for the Mac was back in 1990. I've had Macs since 1986 -- and have used floppy disks, transferred information in and out of them, used e-mail and have had all sorts of "outside connections" with all these Mac. And with *all* the Macs that I've ever had -- in all those years I've had *only 1 virus*. That's it -- just one virus. And that one was wiped off pretty quickly with a run-through of the virus program I had back then (which was Virex).
It's a totally secure machine, great operating system, no one can break into it and I don't get viruses or trojan horses or worms -- even with receiving lots of e-mail, downloading lots of things and using it on lots of web sites and transferring a lot of information back and forth.
It's just great and rock-solid.
Regards,
Star Traveler
And that, my friend, is the crux of the arguement. I too have had Macs continually connected to the internet via DSL/Sattelite/Ethernet local network/wireless/etc. with ZERO breaches. I have even manually taken down the OSX built-in firewall for an experiment, and still didn't have any actual violations....