If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
Posted on 12/05/2007 9:45:20 PM PST by webschooner
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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