Yeah exactly... thats ALL that has been seen lately, there was nothing else... this is the point.
If some other virus or trojan appears it will be written all over the internet about it...
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Does this mean OSX isn't secure? :(
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Yeah exactly... thats ALL that has been seen lately, there was nothing else... this is the point.
If some other virus or trojan appears it will be written all over the internet about it...
On page three it seemed like the soothsayers were giving us a matter of days before the floodgates opened. Have a quick recap and you'll see WILD claims were being made. I just called on people to support their statements, and no one could come up with anything conclusive.
As for the castle and apartment analogy, its a simplistic (and patronising) conveyance of the obscurity theory which as I'm sure you'll have figured out by now, I don't buy, nor did I buy it on page three.
Correct, there's nothing new, but that doesn't make the earlier trojans unable to work on 10.6.
You said this on page 3:
How do dispute Charlie Miller's argument about SL not having full implementation of ASLR and NX?
I'm just curious, because that would be a problem for me, if you're talking security, and not just which is safer (of which Miller says OS X is "safer" than Windows).
I actually do think the lack of full ASLR and NX is a big deal from a security standpoint. Why wouldn't I? I'm not sure why you think I wouldn't. However, early in the thread, assumptions were made on the potential ramifications of these vulnerabilities and stated as fact. I simply asked for the evidence. I received non.
Well I would think that because you said you didn't feel OSX is less secure. But it is, due to this lacking of ASLR and NX.
That's why I asked.
Of course thats my personal opinion, which I strictly stated as opinion, not fact, based on the total lack of consequential security breaches. The speculated ramifications of the potential breaches (stated as fact) were not specified. I simply asked for the evidence. If there is a potential breach I'd be more than concerned, which is why I asked for evidence. None was provided.
That's fine that it's your opinion. But which is it? Is it:
Or is it:
Or could it be that you don't think Macs are less safe than Windows?
The accepted definition safe in this thread would suggest that the reason for substantially less malware on OSX is somehow linked to the obscurity theory - which, I don't buy. The security issues are inexorably linked to this state of safety, that is their purpose, however due to the differing core frameworks of each OS, as will the specific ramifications of these very specific vulnerabilities. I mentioned this earlier:
No one could provide anything more than speculation.
Do you have an answer?
First let's acknowledge that safe != secure. Can we do that?
Second, we'll likely not know for a long time (if ever) if OS X's relative safe nature is due to lack of market share (therefore being a less attractive target) or if it truly is because of the security features.
I also don't quite comprehend how given the following:
And the fact that SL is less secure than Windows 7 x64, that anyone would believe that the lack of malware on OS X doesn't have anything to do with market share. What's keeping it safe then? It's good looks?
Look, I love OS X, and I'm not going anywhere. But this overall complacency over OS X's security (or lack there of) will eventually bite us all in the a$$, simply because the customers are not putting enough pressure on Apple to improve things fast enough. Not only that, they're arrogant about the lack of malware. Ever heard of karma?
I'd rather that you weren't patronising. Thanks.
As I stated in the previous post, the ramifications of these vulnerabilities claimed by many, cannot be determined by assumption based on the nature of windows, as the inherent framework of OSX, based on UNIX, by design has a fundamentally different approach to security.
The safe != secure concept relies on the theory that the lack of malware rests on an assumption that malware developers are too lazy to breach the supposedly sitting duck that is OSX. Apples market share has gone way above and beyond anything that qualifies as a mildly 'obscure' OS. Once the majority of 3rd party developers accept a platform, it is no longer obscure.
Of course - which is why I said this thread was stupid a long time ago. Suddenly people with bold statements and others with 'proof' came along and I thought I'd call them up on it. Nothing turned up.
You could turn that argument around. Since OSX security is so much more vulnerable, to the point of serious OS compromise, why hasn't it been seriously compromised? Apple's market share has been increasing every year for a good few years now. They are certainly a significance on the world market nowadays... which is why I don't buy the obscurity theory. All I asked for was evidence for supposedly factual claims, because I don't believe everything I read on the interwebz.
I'd be the first person to want to know about a potential compromise of OSX itself, which is exactly why I asked for proof of the claims on the matter.
Yes I've heard of Karma... Its a kind of mild curry?
I'd like to order a tall glass of FUD, please, with the tinfoil hat on the side.
Seriously. Funniest thing I've read all month.
Yes before this was maybe two trojans for 10.4 or before tiger but the os was patched and even those didnt work anymore then.
Its a long time now and i dont remember exactly, but i was always following this news.
NO older dont work on leopard, even less on snow leopard sorry.
Shipping Windows with IE embedded into the OS, and with 5 open portals, seems slightly less amusing, none-the-less.I'd like to order a tall glass of FUD, please, with the tinfoil hat on the side.
Seriously. Funniest thing I've read all month.
I doubt that OS X is as secure as Vista and Windows 7 -- Microsoft put a lot of effort into making their latest platforms as secure as possible, and they also recruited a lot of help from external (governmental) organizations to make Vista and 7 secure. Vista and 7 use a completely refined architecture than their predecessors (which caused many of the initial compatibility and performance issues), so whatever might have been true for older versions of Windows simply is not true anymore for the current releases.
That being said, the most secure operating system for the Intel architecture still is... OpenBSD. However, OpenBSD is not very useful as a desktop system.
Also, just for the record, I am using Microsoft platforms since the early 1980s, and so far I have experienced only two problems with malware: One was the funny DOS-virus "Doodle44" (which was not even meant to harm a system) and the very evil worm W32.BLASTER in 2003 which caused me a lot of headaches and work. Other than that, from an overall perspective, Microsoft systems work at least as well as the competing products and are much better than their reputation. At least Microsoft -has- products for almost everything in their portfolio; companies like Apple simply don't have that wide range of products that Microsoft has.
Also, for the record, in my job I simply have to be platform agnostic because in my current company we use everything from Solaris over various Linux distributions to Windows desktops and servers. Since I have to take care of them all, I cannot be picky about what I use. But the simple fact remains that the Windows desktop and server platforms are the most flexible and best supported of them all. There literally is nothing that you cannot do with Windows - but there's a lot of stuff that's just not available for Linux or Solaris or OS X. And that usually ends the discussion.
Sure, but from an economic perspective, Apple's market share is still too small to make it an interesting target for malware authors with commercial interests - especially since most of the Apple users are home users.
It's just a nice cliche for the media that a bored 16-year-old with no girl friend takes over the Pentagon network. In real life, writing malware is a lucrative criminal business. And usually one that does not involve Apple computers because they simply do not play a role in the enterprise business.
You know that darwin (core of osx) is a derivative from BSD, NEXTSTEP and other opensource software right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
I wasn't being patronising, thanks.
It's simple economics, as Miller states in the article I quoted. 90% of the machines in the world run Windows. Which target would you like to aim for? Would you write malware for 10% of the market, or would you write malware for 90% of the market, which also happens to comprise a huge portion of business desktops? Remember, malware isn't just script kiddies anymore. This is big business.
First, I never claimed that OS X was swiss cheese and as bad as XP either; you're misunderstanding me. It's still a relatively secure OS.
But the obscurity theory in my opinion definitely holds up, because when given two OSes, one a little less secure than the other, but with a fraction of the market share, there's no other logical explanation for it.
So what? You act like there aren't vulnerabilities for BSD or UNIX. Same goes for Linux.
I was referring to Winni... he said:
That being said, the most secure operating system for the Intel architecture still is... OpenBSD. However, OpenBSD is not very useful as a desktop system.
He's right; however as he said it doesn't make a very good desktop OS, and when you add in all the userland stuff that's been added to OS X, that's where the difficulty in maintaining security is.
Not really if you make a regular user that doesnt know admin password... there is NO WAY he will make changes to ANY system file. Same is if you dont type your password on prompt, and no software is capable to do it without pass either.
And guess what: THAT EXACTLY THE CASE IN WINDOWS TOO!!!. I'm pretty sure that half of you that are always complaining about Windows have not touched a PC for 10 years.
I have seen a BSOD once or twice in the past 5 years. And that happens on a DELL desktop connected to a microscope that is 15 years old and a camera that is connected to both and is like 5 years old. I'm surprised it does not crash every minute. With a Mac we will never be able to connect such a device, so is useless to discuss whether it would be more stable or not. It's a question of flexibility.