“You sound like Chicken Little... and have just as much credibility.”
ok, you went down the personal attack path. You have absolutely no idea of what I know. I’ve been writing and designing code for over 35 years, across many OS’s, at the server level, down at the embedded device driver level, and everything in-between. I have a global team working for me on projects you probably wouldn’t even understand.
My last post was reasoned but I’m done with this due to your inability to be civil. You’re an Apple zealot and blind to what the current landscape trends are.
You’d think between FReepers that a civil tone would be maintained, disappointing.
LOL! Fuzz, I started coding in 1967, so your attempt ad ad hominem is mis-directed. If you felt I made a "personal attack," I apologize. It was not intended to be.
I said you sounded like Chicken Little, not that you are. As for credibility, that's because we have heard this same litany for too many years. . . and it has NEVER come to light, Fuzzy. Not even once in twenty years. For such a claim to become reality, the proof is going to have to be extraordinary to be credible.
Too many times we've heard the same impending malware horror stories only to find it is coming from someone who has never used Apple products and only understands the Windows third-party anti-malware protection model, or an anti-malware company with something they are trying to sell to Apple users, always something at best unnecessary, at worst something that actually does harm to Apple's built-in protections.
fuzzyLogic: Hackers will always target the most deployed systems, which is Android and Windows, period.
No, Fuzzy, it isn't and it certainly isn't "period." You are preaching the "Security by Obscurity" canard about Apple products. It simply is not true.
I posted above several examples of true computer viruses written to exploit almost microscopic installations, yet you have maintained that people who write malware only write to target the largest targets. That is just not true, and there are a LOT more examples. Hackers write malware to target MONEY, so they attack the MOST VULNERABLE SYSTEMS, and sometimes they attack for notoriety, and the most notoriety, especially in the hacking community, can be gained by hacking the supposed un-hackable. Ask Charlie Miller.
It is well established that Apple users are wealthier and have more disposable cash than PC users. That's where the money is. Target Rich Environment. It's also well established that Macs and iOS devices have a reputation of remote impenetrability, so there's your notoriety component, attractive in two ways for hackers. . . yet they've gone un-penetrated even though 99% of Macs are not protected by third-party anti-malware and an even higher rate holds for iOS devices. Yet there are 150 million to 250 million unprotected, naked Macs and 1.3 Billion iOS devices in the wild, very attractive numbers for any malicious hacker to target. Why haven't they, Fuzz?
Given those facts, the percentage of Apple iOS devices installed base ranges from 38% to 43% of the installed base of 3 billion to 3.7 billion mobile devices. It's not the SALES market of 18% to 20% reported each quarter. Among teens in the US, it was just reported 10 days ago that iPhones have an 82% installed base, and growing.
Hackers have been TRYING to write malware to hack into Apple products. It has been the prime target for many years at White Hat conventions and usually they've been successful and won prizes. . . but they have not been general hacks translatable in to hacks applicable for use in the wild. Nor have they been ad hoc exploits conceived at the conventions, but rather the products of months of work that is merely revealed at the convention.
Apple pays good size vulnerability bounties throughout the year, not just at those contests and conventions and is proactive in closing any that are found.
In twenty years of trying, there have been only seven known true self-replicating, self-transmitting, self-installing, self-executing computer virus or worm candidates for Apple OSX, and every single one of them failed to work due to lack of a viable vector in the Mac environment.
One of those candidates, intended to propagate via bluetooth, was sent to a anti-virus company in the Silicon Valley. It took two Mac engineers from Apple, two malware specialists from the anti-virus company, and two knowledgeable, and well experienced computer journalists from Computerworld over six hours of effort just to get it to replicate itself and then send itself from one Mac to another and then it failed to run due to it being in protected non-executable memory.
The ONLY viable malware vector left is social engineering: Trojan horse applications, tricking the user into downloading and installing the malware himself. Even there, the Mac's built-in, daily updated, GateKeeper system will recognize all of the current known Mac Trojans and the eight known families of Trojan attacks and warn the user, requiring an Administrator's name and password to continue, not just a simplistic OK. Even those trojan attacks, if you look at the numbers of Macs that were involved in the infections are listed with under Zero to 100 computer affected. The highest reported one, which claimed 600,000 infected Macs, turned out to be a hoax, and actually had ZERO infected Macs.
Look at TexasGunLover's posts for personal attacks in this thread. There you will find them against ALL Apple users.
But, Fuzz, my FRiend, you need to reconsider your knowledge about the installed base of Macs and the iOS devices you write software for. You are completely missing data you should have or are misunderstanding the data that's been published about sales share, not installed base, which is, I admit, much hard to come by. Apple's devices have record of lasting two to three time longer than most Android devices and therefor have a much higher aftermarket resale value than Android devices, thus they stay active in use far longer than do the Android devices.