Mac attacks rare, but real – eat your words oh Mac zealots

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 22 October 2006 20:58

Your IT - Entertainment

Back to a bit of seriousness however, CNN’s recent article ‘Security analysts: Mac attacks rare but may rise’ is quick to point out that the chance of Mac users being affected by vulnerabilities and attacks is slim, but that this is changing.

To quote from the article, “Oliver Friedrichs, director of security response at Symantec, a leading anti-virus software vendor, said 72 vulnerabilities were discovered in the Mac's OS X operating system in 2006, up from 19 in 2004. And Symantec identified six threats of malicious code written for the Mac OS X operating system in the first half of 2006, versus zero in the second half of 2005 and two the year before that. "It doesn't mean more bugs are being introduced," Friedrichs said. "But it means attackers are increasingly looking at it."

Security companies discovered the Mac OSX/Leap-A virus earlier this year. News of this was delivered by other security companies as well, and despite protestations by some that this was not a real ‘virus’, the facts proved otherwise. At the Sophos website, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos said that "Some owners of Mac computers have held the belief that Mac OS X is incapable of harboring computer viruses, but Leap-A will leave them shellshocked, as it shows that the malware threat on Mac OS X is real".

Cluley continues: "Mac users shouldn't think it's okay to lie back and not worry about viruses. This is the first real virus for the Mac OS X platform," continued Cluley. "Apple Mac users need to be just as careful running unknown or unsolicited code on their computers as their friends and colleagues running Windows."

So, while you may have an easier time with computing on the Mac, whether it be through a more intuitive graphical user interface or more hardiness to computer security vulnerabilities, you just can’t afford to be complacent about security. Not in the online world, and not in the offline world. It’s just like not being able to afford complacency about regular timely backups.

Because if you are, one day, you are guaranteed to wake up and find one of the following, no matter what operating system or computing platform you use. This list is in no particular order, and when it happens, unless you are prepared with security software and importantly a recent, up-to-date backup, you’ll find your computing world and access to your data changes drastically in a heartbeat.

1. Your hard drive crashes (it can happen on  Mac too!)

2. Other hardware failure strikes

3. A virus attack (viruses exist on the Mac! This cannot be denied)

4. Computer theft

5. A backup that isn’t recent enough

6. A backup hard disk that was stolen along with the computer (a second off-site backup and/or a secure online backup is recommended)

7. Your bubble of invincibility has an unscheduled service interruption and goes pop.

8. Something else that unexpectedly pops up to cause chaos. It’s called life, and stuff happens.

The question is whether or not you will let it happen to you. Get a Mac backup program and a large external hard drive, and set it to backup automatically or at the very least, backup manually on a regular basis. Investigate Internet security software on Macs to protect yourself, and others.

Make sure you check that your Mac has updated itself, even if this is supposed to be set to automatic. Make sure to check all your software is suitably updated. And remember that nothing is secure in this world, it can only be made as secure as can be, but that’s never a 100% iron-clad guarantee. Since when did the EULA (end-user licensing agreement) of any software package ever offer that, anyway?

Happy Mac computing, Mac users. Looking forward to joining you soon, and enjoying the pure operating system choice today’s Macs deliver in spades. Also looking forward to all of the new releases that Steve Jobs has just hinted about in claiming that 2007 will be one of the most exciting in history. Let’s just hope it’s for the right reasons for Apple, and not the wrong ones!