Re: [MLUG] Mac moving to Intel

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On 6/7/05, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Jun 2005, McNutt, Justin M. wrote:
> 
> > We're seeing a lot of Macs sold in IATS because of spyware and security
> > problems on Windows.
> 
> Are Windows' spyware problems caused by a flaw in Windows design, or are
> spyware designers just focusing their efforts on windows? 

As best as I can tell, both.  In one sense, you would expect there to
be more attackers of windows boxes, but I don't think anyone thinks
that implies that there should be millions of zombie PCs and billions
of dollars lost in time and cleaning effort for PCs.  You can still
get into trouble on a Mac (or almost anything else) by downloading
evil code and installing it, but this requires more active effort by
the user than (say) surfing to a random website and having the exploit
installed as images are loading (or something)

When Tiger came out, Apple actually did something I'm a bit wary of in
that Dashboard widgets seem not to have so strong a security model as
you might like, but even there, you have to actually click to install
the thing, and now you do get a prompt asking if you want to install
widget X.  Plus the widget can only run from a given location...  But
I'm still a bit worried.

> Sometimes
> Windows problems are caused by Windows' popularity.  If OS X were to
> become as popular as Windows, would it then have the same spyware
> problems, or is OS X designed to prevent such problems?

I'm sure it would have some problems, but I'm guessing not the same
problems, and not to the same degree.  Normal users just don't have
the permission to do really dangerous things without at least a  bit
of  effort, unless there's bug to exploit.  Somebody could check, but
I think a large-ish number of the security fixes for Mac OS X have
been patches to openssh, or patches to things like Safari that make
try to make it clearer when you've been hijacked onto a dubious site. 
As far as I know, phishing is still by far the most productive way to
get information impropertly from a Mac user.

jking

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