![]() "In this regard, a platform's security depends on its popularity and the level of effort versus reward-that is, what is the expected return on effort."įor cyber attackers, the decision to write malware for a particular operating system is an investment requiring the development of new skills, the acquisition of new software programs, even the learning of new slang, Savage says. "Clearly, if a platform is unpopular then there is really not much interest in focusing on it," he adds. Market share certainly plays a role, but in subtle ways, agrees Stefan Savage, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego. Now that they've acquired a fairly sizeable market share, it makes sense that the bad guys would focus some attention on the Mac platform." "The only reason Macs were not massively targeted is that they didn't have enough of a market share to make them interesting for a hacker to devote resources to try to compromise those machines. "In the computer community we've been saying for five, six, seven years that Mac is not more immune to computer viruses than Windows PCs or even Linux boxes, " says Nicolas Christin, associate director of Carnegie Mellon University's Information Networking Institute. Mac users can expect more incidents like Flashback will follow. In the U.S., Apple last year owned more than 10 percent of the PC market, behind only HP and Dell, according to technology research firm Gartner. Macs still represent only a small portion of the overall worldwide computer market, but their share has risen to roughly 7 percent in recent years and is expected to grow steadily. The same year Microsoft introduced Patch Tuesday, Macs represented less than 1.5 percent of desktop computers and less than 3.5 percent of laptop computers worldwide. Apple was a relatively minor player in the PC market, attracting little attention from cyber criminals who could make more money exploiting Windows. Beginning in 2003 Microsoft became infamous for " Patch Tuesday," a monthly release of security patches (sometimes dozens at a time) to fix problems in its operating system, along with Internet Explorer and other software. For nearly two decades, Microsoft's success has kept it in the crosshairs of cyber criminals by virtue of Windows's popularity and, at least early on, the company's inattentiveness to bolstering security as the operating system grew more complex. This is not the first time Apple has had to contend with a malware outbreak, but it is by far the largest and most public scar sullying the company's aura of invincibility.Īpple has been able to avoid such security problems in the past for a number of reasons. Written as a Trojan horse program, Flashback has infected hundreds of thousands of Macs to date, allowing cyber criminals to steal information from those computers and turn many of them into virtual zombies that can be manipulated to attack other computers. The emergence of a group of malicious software (malware) programs in recent months- collectively known as Flashback or Flashfake-that specifically target Macs and their OS X operating system now has Apple in the unfamiliar position of being on the defensive. Apple has long enjoyed the reputation of making a computing platform that provides security protection that is superior to its peers-in a word, Microsoft.
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