May 27th, 2011
Sometimes it feels like Steve Jobs wants me to leave Apple and pack it in for PC land. In an FT story about scareware coming to the Mac OS, there’s this:
For Mac owners running Safari in the default mode that enables downloading of “safe” files, the malicious programs began installing automatically and then prompted the users for their passwords to finish the job. If they complied, the software ran when the machine restarted, reporting bogus infections and asking for payment.
Apple’s initial response to waves of callers to its AppleCare tech support lines was unhelpful, according to leaked internal instructions posted on the tech news site ZDNet.
Staff were told to neither confirm nor deny infections and to steer callers to Apple’s online stores for security products.
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What have I been telling you for years? Apple users will become a viable target for hackers when there were enough of you to make it worth the while. That time is here and now. Thank you iPad2.
What’s the greater crime committed by Apple? That they gave off the aura of virus/malware invincibility, thus leading their customers (along with the I’d-commit-seppuku-if-my-Samurai-Lord-and-master-Jobs asked-it-of-me fanbois) to think that Macs/iPhones/iPads are completely impregnable to viruses/malware. OR their response to this which is deny there’s a problem and/or SELL more product?
Dell doesn’t even suck that badly at customer service.
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SkinsFan—my husband owns two computer repair shops, so I know of what I speak. The problem isn’t so much with Mac users being “smarter” as you implied, it has to do with how well any user (Mac or PC) controls their impulses. The two largest suppliers of viruses/malware/rootkits, etc. on the web are 1. p0Rn sites and (ironically) b. websites directed toward children. Both of these respective populations are comprised of people w/ impulse control issues, i.e. will they download free stuff/misleading stuff on the fly? Yes, yes they will. Will they install it without thinking twice? Yes, yes they will. If it were about being smart, and being able to suss out a scam, we wouldn’t have as one of our clients a PhD carrying, seven figure earning, computer engineer at one of the large tech companies here in the Silicon Hills. (Also, there ARE viruses on Macs. You don’t see it a lot, but they do exist, and when they hit a Mac, the result is ugly, let me tell you.)
Apple makes billions catering to people who have to HAVE IT NOW–whatever ‘it’ might be. That makes those users vulnerable to hackers. If they were using a PC, they would have learned this lesson the hard way already. The fact that hackers work solely on volume means the more Apple users there are, the more likely it is that hackers will target them.
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Kathy, I’ve been an IT Professional (desktop support technician, network admin, security admin, project manager on multi-million dollar projects, program manager of multi-project programs, business analyst, etc…) for 15 years, including the past 11 years at one of the largest and most diverse network environments in the US. So I too know of what I speak.
I did not say that Mac users are any smarter, merely that they are aware of the fact that the relative threat to their computer is minor when compared to the threat Windows PCs face. Scareware threats are predicated on the user believing there computers are infected with a real virus/malware. There simply is no question that PC users are far more likely to believe their computers are infected than Mac users, because THE ACTUAL THREAT IS MUCH GREATER.
Mind you, there is currently no real virus/malware that infects Macs, and therefore it is less likely that a Mac user would fall for a Scareware scam. One of the main reasons why there are no serious virus/malware threats to Macs is that the OS, which is just a unix distro with a proprietary GUI, is inherently more secure than the Windows OS.Look, there is a reason why security admins are Linux/Unix/Mac users, and not PC users.
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[…] [UPDATE]: The person who emailed me this has passed along where he got it from. […]
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This is probably coincidental, but yesterday I forwarded the above link to my Mac using, Apple loving wife and within hours her Macbook had been hit by the same pseudo virus described in the article. The very helpful people at Apple said she could have gotten it from any website, which made me think that the perfect place to hide such a mac-cancer would be in just such an online news article detailing the new threat. Everybody who reads it then forwards the link to all their Mac friends and family, and thus spreads the contagion to the very people most vulnerable to it.
SkinsFanPG May 27, 2011 at 1:19 pm
While Macs may become more of a target (something PC users have been claiming for a decade. but hey, even a broken watch is right twice a day) the simple fact is that the Mac OS is inherently more secure than the Windows OS. Notice that the first REAL threat to a Mac is scareware, in which a website uses a pop-up to scare people into downloading malware to correct a non-existent problem. I suspect the overwhelming majority of Mac users won’t fall for this because they know such attacks are scams and their Mac isn’t infected.