Pushpa Sathish on Nov 9th, 2006

There’s nothing more challenging to the hacker than the challenge of a new challenge. Mac users have been turned into sitting ducks with Apple’s cocksure attitude that their systems are hacker-proof, if you can call them that. What they haven’t understood till today is that their machines are not the Fort Knox of the computer world, they’re just under the impression that they are!

The reason for this misconception? Hackers are less inclined to target Mac machines since a trifling of the world’s population uses them; with Microsoft grabbing a large share of the OS market, they prefer to grab Windows’ users by the scruff of the neck.

But of late, the scenario is shifting and the spotlight is on Macintosh and its Apple operating systems. Hackers are looking for newer playgrounds and have found an untapped gold mine at Mac. A few figures that show that Apple is the newest bull’s eye for the hackers’ darts:

• According to McAfee, the number of vulnerabilities found in Macintosh increased 228 percent in the two-year period between 2003 and 2005; Microsoft had an increase of only 78 percent in the same term.
• The first worm specially written for Mac OS X, OSX/Leap.A, was discovered in February 2006. Security vendor Internet Security Systems (ISS) reports that the number of vulnerabilities found for Mac this May was threefold that for Microsoft.
• Apple video iPods were found to have been infected by RavMonE, a Windows virus, in October.

For argument’s sake, let’s just say that Mac users are in fact secure because of their underlying OS, at least more secure than Microsoft’s minions, this utopia will not last for long, predicts Peter Lindstrom of market research group Burton Group. Why? Because attackers are focusing more on application holes rather than OS vulnerabilities. This effectively means that all computer users are at equal risk, whether they use a Mac or not!