Posted on 10/28/2004 5:48:05 PM PDT by Rodney King
Weird things are happening these days. The Red Sox win the World Series (in four games, yet!)—and hackers hit the Macintosh. It’s hard to say which is the stranger event.
The Apple community has—since its inception—been largely immune to nefarious hackers bent on spreading harm. If you are a Windows user, as I am, you know the routine. You complain about the latest spyware or virus attack, and Apple devotees respond with good-natured teasing—they don’t have worry about such nonsense. Well, now they do. That’s not true anymore.
Predictably, posts on various Apple-related message boards have been offering varying levels of concern, ranging from mild disappointment to utter gloom. I think this reaction is fundamentally misguided. MAC users should not be upset about this malware news; they should rejoice.
Huh? Why should the Apple community be celebrating the news? Before I explain, let me make one thing clear: I’m not advocating this kind of hacking, and certainly—as a victim of a virus attack myself not too long ago—I empathize with anyone who has been attacked. That said, this program is a milestone in computing history because the Apple community is finally large enough that it has drawn the attention of the hackers.
Here’s what happened: Last week, astute Mac users discovered a program dubbed “Opener.” This piece of code embeds itself onto Macs running OS X, the latest Apple operating system, and disables the computer’s firewall. The malware also locates and collects any password information it can find on the infected system, leaving behind a password-cracking program called “John the Ripper.” It is believed that Opener can be called into action remotely utilizing a “bot net,” in which a remote hacker plants malware onto unsuspecting users’ computers and then calls that code into action. (For more on bot nets, see my earlier column on the topic.).
Apple’s imperviousness to viruses and the like was based on two factors. First, the Macintosh is more secure than Windows, in part because of Apple’s reliance on more secure Unix components for its underlying operating system foundation; this explains why, technically, the Mac is less vulnerable to viruses, Trojan horses, and malware than is Microsoft’s software. But second, and more important, the Apple user community simply wasn’t big enough for hackers to target. Hackers want headlines and notoriety, among other things. What’s the point of creating a program that will affect only four percent of the computing population, when you can spend as much time creating something that will affect 96 percent?
Apple’s market share is still in the single digits, but as this week’s U2 iPod announcement—not to mention the company’s sky-high stock price—shows, Apple is back. According to the company’s most recent earnings statement, Apple sold 836,000 Macs in the latest quarter, up six percent from the previous quarter. Sales of iPods zoomed up 500 percent from the year-ago period. And dare I say, the company is performing better than ever before? Its new color-screen iPod can’t help but stimulate interest in the device. The company’s conspicuous public presence these days, coupled with a slow but steady growth in number of Macintosh users, makes it a target for those who seek to do harm.
It was encouraging to see the Apple community respond quickly to address the Opener threat. Because Apple fans aren’t used to viruses and the like, they don’t have the same industry of virus watchers at the ready, scanning the Web for any suspicious activity. When a virus hits Windows systems, anti-virus companies immediately spring into action, issuing fixes and alerts. Not so here. The first alerts of Opener that I could find were from individual users, discussing strange findings on their computers. “It's important that a warning get out quickly,” wrote one person on a Mac message board on October 22. “I'm now actually a bit spooked,” wrote another. Three days later, Sophos, an anti-virus company, posted a fix for the problem.
Three days is a pretty long lag time between alerts and a fix, but the Apple community is just now finding its sea legs in the world of malware. It’s an odd thing to be celebrating, but Apple maniacs should actually see this development as an event with positive underpinnings. Mac users’ next move should be to pop open a bottle of champagne and do their best Sally Field impersonation: “You like us! You really like us!”
Eric Hellweg is a technology writer based in Cambridge, MA.
"You complain about the latest spyware or virus attack, and Apple devotees respond with good-natured teasing"
That is, until you're standing next to them in the game section at Best Buy..
This site has been hacked...or something. Refreshing takes me backwards. Anybody else?
Ping!
Yawn
I just set up my new G-5 iMac, It's AMAZING! So Don't F#$k with me.......
me also plus your name isnt in the to field for some reason, freaky.
Wait until I finish building my athlon 64 system,just waiting for the new nforce4 moboards to come out.
Then again, a lot of people in hollywood and the music biz use Mac and as we all know, many of them are liberals.
PC users are sooooo weak. OS X is for productivity, Windows is for solitaire.
This "virus" or "malware" is nothing but a script that can be put on someone's computer. The only security hole this accentuates is that a computer without a password or a computer connected to the internet with ports open (such as FTP or SMB file sharing) without a properly configured firewall can be compromised. This "opener" application is simply a program, not a self-propagating virus. The same program can be installed on any Windows computer (with the requisite code changes) and do exactly the same thing. Macintoshes are MUCH more secure than any Windows platform when it comes to susceptibility to viruses, and this is inarguable.
Not sure what OS you like, but Suse x86_64 runs most excellent on it. Haven't tried windows 64 bit yet..can't see it on my horizon either..The Suse team did a great job at parsing the 64 and 32 bit libraries...DVD playback was the only shortcoming, but easy enough to get around...
A hacker...now that's one beheading video I would like to see.
LOL got that right. I'm dumping my crappy HP Pavilion and buying a Mac this Xmas.
Is that the reason or is it the fact that some hacker is just challenged by the Apple user's smugness?
As someone who likes both systems just fine, I would like to correct a common factual error in the article.
In the very early '90's Macs were probably MORE of a target for viruses than PCs. My job at the time, as a "resource specialist" in a liberal arts college in Hartford, CT had me overseeing the Mac user lab. My "Virex" updates came frequently (via mail in those days) as college students shared diskettes, and Mac users shared more.
Mac viruses were VERY easy to write, but also generally easy to eradicate. The more sophisticated BIOS ROMs had a lot to do with that. DOS boxes, on the other hand, if infected, were in great danger of having the FAT table completely corrupted. Some Mac viruses (e.g. WDEF) could be eradicated simply by "rebuilding the desktop." However, at the time, the Mac viruses seemed to spread more quickly. DOS PCs, although dominant even then, did not spread viruses as quickly due to lack of common applications. Before Windows 3.1, no word processor had more than a 1/3 of the market, and no spreadsheet had more than half, in my estimation. E-mail programs were proprietary, and attachments were not frequently part of the picture. Once most people standardized on Word, the macro viruses started popping up like crazy, and the virus writing had gone almost all-pc ever since then.
And a lot of people in publishing, TV, radio and even some manufacturing.
A large military books publisher in the midwest uses Macs. I know a candy company that runs their entire production line on Macs.
And no Mac user list on FR would be complete without a mention of Rush Limbaugh and George W. Bush.
I cant wait for it, the new nforce4 boards allow for dual video card usage as well as pci express allowing for doubling the frame rate for geeks who like that stuff.
Hey, freepmail me when you get your system setup..Would like to hear your input...
BTW, Why aren't you going for an AMD64 FX (snicker..my jaw hit thetable when I saw that price..)
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