It’s been very debatable as to what the real reason is for the actual lack of problems with infections and/or infiltrations of Macintosh computers. Some say it’s because of the obscurity of the operating system. I’ve seen others who say that it’s because a lot of programmers don’t have a big beef with Apple like a lot of programmers seem to have with Microsoft. Others say it is because it — is — actually more secure.
Now we can argue all day long as to what the real reasons are for the — missing problems — with viruses and taking over a Macintosh computer and controlling it and so on.
BUT, for most people they don’t care about the reasons why. All they care about is that it simply doesn’t happen, as it does in the Windows world.
So, for those ordinary and normal users, all of the so-called experts can argue all day long and the ordinary user will simply enjoy the benefits of what he or she has, with the Macintosh Operating System — over Windows operating system.
I’ve got my ideas of why the lack of these kinds of problems are the “state of affairs” for the Macintosh, but it doesn’t matter to me whether anyone else believes me or not. All that matters to me is — that is the way it is — and that’s worth a lot, all by itself. I enjoy the current state of affairs.
I would imagine quite a few Macintosh users enjoy it as well...
Well, viruses have hit cellphones.... And the Mac has quite a huge installed base - 5% of e-friggin-normous is still a huge number.... And there's the opportunity to let a lot of air out of the viewpoint that the Mac is more secure.
That adds up to plenty of motivation to write a persuasive Mac OS X virus.
All you offer is speculation. All we offer is results. Some "professional" - ha!
As I believe swordmaker pointed out on another thread, someone wrote a virus that infects iPods rigged to run Linux, of which there probably aren't enough to break five figures. The "obscurity" excuse just doesn't work when there are viruses for far smaller user bases.
Exactly ... it is a matter of numbers and intent.
No interest at all in all those UNIX servers either I guess. The U.S. Army Switched to Apache running on OSX and haven't been hacked since.
The "Security by Obscurity" canard has been shot down many times.
There are 23,000,000 OS X Macintoshes being used right now. That is not obscure.
In addition, Apple has been advertising its superior security for over a year now (those ads just were awarded the top prize for Television Advertising, the Grand Effie)... and that should be equivalent to throwing down the gauntlet to thousands of hackers who would love to be known as the cracker who wrote a viable Macintosh OSX virus that could infect machines in the wild.
There have been a few Mac virus candidates seen only in security company labs... All of them have been less than successful and none of them had a viable vector to spread. One of them took TWO security experts and TWO OS X software engineers SIX HOURS just to get it to copy itself from one Mac to another... and then it didn't do what it was claimed to do.
Studies have been done which show that Apple Mac users are, as a group, more affluent than their PC using compatriots... and that Mac users tend to run NO anti-spyware, anti-adware, or anti-virus applications (because, as yet, in six years of experience, there are effectively ZERO of any of those encountered on Mac OS X!\) so they should be sitting ducks for even the simplest spyware or virus that comes along.
Crackers have written viruses for iPods running Linux as an operating system... all 200 of them in the world. Other malware authors have written viruses designed to infect all 12,000 unpatched Black Ice Firewalled machines and every single one was infected within 45 minutes of the virus being released into the wild. Viruses have been written to infect 32,000 Internet LAN Routers... and viruses have been written to infect approximately 50,000 users of a specific make of Internet capable cell phone. Yet you claim that NO ONE is interested in exploiting a population of 23,000,000 MAC USERS who are UNPROTECTED BY ANTI-MALWARE? Absurd.
Contests have been staged for security experts to hack into a stock Mac. The most recent was the contest at the Canadian Western Computer Security Conference where all attendees were challenged to break into an out-of-the-box MacBook Pro. The successful cracker would win the MacBook plus $10,000. After the first two days, when none had been successful, the rules were relaxed and crackers were allowed to have the referees navigate to specific websites the crackers had designed and click on various links they found there. Only when that was allowed was a user level access hack successful using a hole in Java and iTunes. No one succeeded in winning the second MacBook Pro and another $10,000 by achieving a ROOT access. These were some of the top computer security experts in the world.
Another was mounted by an assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin. Intended to run a full seven days, the contest ran for 37 hours until bandwidth concerns forced the cancellation of the contest. Thousands of attempts to break in were unsuccessful.
Your assertion that the security in OS X is not designed in is incorrect and ignores the almost 40 years of UNIX development that underpins the FreeBSD UNIX core that runs OSX. It has been acid tested by thousands of open source developers who have examined the code with a microscope... and the trials by fire in which UNIX was attacked and the holes used were patched over those years.