If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
Posted on 12/05/2007 9:45:20 PM PST by webschooner
SAN FRANCISCO - Apple products, including the Mac and the iPhone, are increasingly being targeted by computer hackers according to new research, shattering years of relative safety for the Apple camp.
This year has proven to be a banner year for the Cupertino, Calif.-based electronics maker. Apple's hardware have sold more than any other year, but the larger user base makes it increasingly more enticing for hackers with malicious intent.
Apple sold 2.1m Macs in the third quarter, up from 1.1m in the first quarter of 2006, according to Gartner, the research group.
"Mac's market share is now significant enough for parasites to target," security firm F-Secure said, noting that "malware gangs don't make an effort to develop something without the promise of a profitable return."
The company said the rise in attacks against Apple appeared to be the work of a single gang of professional hackers known in underground networks as the "Zlob gang." The crew makes spyware that often claims to be a needed "video codec" to view copy-protected media.
The rising security threat could present a challenge to Apple, which has long touted the security advantages of its platform over rivals. Apple declined to discuss specific steps it was taking to counter the growing number of attacks.
The Zlob gang relies on tricking users to download and install their malicious software. Once installed, Zlob variants typically show fake error messages designed to convince the computer user into installing and buying rogue antispyware products.
Other malware from the group also include a DNSChanger, which silently reconfigure the computer's DNS server settings.
DNS servers are responsible for converting people friendly text URLs into computer friendly numeric IP addresses. Once the DNS settings are changed to their servers the Zlob gang is in control of the Web browser's destination.
The iPhone, which ha s sold over 1.4 million iPhones to date, is also a target, the company said.
"[The iPhone] uses a version of Mac OSX, which is in turn based on Unix," F-Secure said. If you understand Unix security, then you can relatively easily 'port' your knowledge and understanding to the iPhone."
News of Apple's growing attacks comes as the number of viruses and other malware has doubled over the past year.
F-Secure had detected 500,000 viruses, trojans and worms in 2007, compared with 250,000 last year.
Actually the point is not moot. The software firewall is inadequate for protecting a windows computer. If you doubt that, I'd suggest you put a windows box on your outside DMZ and attempt to get it patched before it is p0wned.
You're safer with a cable/dsl modem which acts as an external hardware firewall, but you're still vulnerable when someone brings a p0wned box from home and plugs it into your network.
My point was, NONE of the attacks they've come out with to try to attack Macs has yet been able to propagate without user intervention. That is just not true at all for the MS-windows world.
As a matter of fact the computer I’m using right now has spent a significant amout of time on a static IP with no hardware firewall — just the Windows firewall. There’s really no difference in the port scans. They’re all stealthed.
We Mac users should now don hair shirts and start whipping our shoulders with barbed wire because a computer security firm has announced (for the fifth year in a row) that Macs are no longer secure.
Ho hum.
They tell the world that IF a user downloads a Trojan, and IF he ignores the warning the OS provides that the download contains an application, and IF he also double clicks on what appears to be a non-application icon that resulted from his download and IF he ignores the warning that he is running an application for the first time, THEN his Mac might install a suspicious malicious application that can modify his user preferences to modify his DNS interpreter.
Since when is it news that a computer can run an application?
The first malware Trojan for OSX appeared in 2002. An application that pretends to do one thing when in actuality it does another is not news. A self replicating, self installing, self transmitting, and repeating application would be news.
It hasn't happened on OSX yet.
I really like the last two paragraphs that are intended to imply that 500,000 Mac malware has been "found," a word that implies this implied Mac malware is in the wild. How dishonest can they get?
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
"Mac's market share is now significant enough for parasites to target," security firm F-Secure said...and the irony of that sentence is...
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