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I think what all of this exemplifies is two populations of users (Mac OS and Windows) that have developed very different attitudes to security. Unfortunately, Apple’s implementation is not as advanced as that in Windows, and hence it does not provide the same degree of protection.Īpple said it planned to improve items such as ASLR in its next release of Mac OS, but some five years later we are still waiting.

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Mac OS acquired ASLR in late 2007 (Mac OS X v10.5, aka “Leopard”).

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This is where regions of computer memory that should not be used for executing code are misused by rogue software.Īs well as preventing developers inadvertently building this into their applications by adding safeguards to the compilers, Microsoft also introduced memory protection mechanisms within their operating systems.įor example, since Vista was introduced in 2007, Windows has had address space layout randomisation (ASLR) which is implemented so as to obscure most of what an attacker needs to conduct, for example, shell code injection attacks. Initially, one of the biggest threats was considered by Microsoft to be buffer overflow. However, Microsoft took a long look at the threat and made a conscious effort to evolve their operating systems to counter it.

A security model had previously existed but it wasn’t until XP, where objects were given Security IDs and allowed actions were enabled in a way similar to Unix, that a model existed that had the same value as that in Unix. Ten years ago, when Windows gained a bad reputation for security, Microsoft responded by introducing its Trustworthy Computing Initiative. Likewise, you might exploit a vulnerability in a third party application, as happened recently when a backdoor Trojan embedded inside boobytrapped Word documents successfully ran on Macs. You might run, for example, a piece of JavaScript that steals credentials, or a keylogger, without necessarily attacking the operating system. But is it in fact just tidier?įundamentally, there is no reason why Macs should not be targeted using malware in the same way that viruses, Trojans and worms are built to target Windows systems. So, Mac OS “feels” like it should be more secure.

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The corollary of this is that it is easy to completely remove an installation.Īnyone who has installed software onto a Windows platform knows that the installed components can be placed in a wide variety of folders, the obscurity of which mean that if you were ever to attempt to unpick the installation manually you’d inevitably end up with some unwanted pieces of code on your machine.įor Windows, this has spawned a whole host of tools for the uninstall and clean-up process.

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When you install a program in Unix, you typically predict which folders the executables and data will reside. Unix has other simple features, such as storing executable code and data in separate folders. The concept of Read, Write and Execute for various executables and data, as implemented in Unix, is simple to understand and has stood Unix systems in good stead for many years. That was not always the case for Windows as it was originally based upon MS-DOS. If you began your career using Unix, as I did, one of the things you come to value is that Unix (and hence Mac OS) has always had a security model built into the operating system. Mac OS, the Apple Mac operating system, is based upon the Berkley Software Distribution (BSD) of Unix, surrounded by a nice graphical user interface. The attack has left a lingering question: how secure are Apple Macs?Īpple has traditionally marketed its systems as being more secure than those running Microsoft Windows, but how true is that?

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'Flashback would now have infected 1% of Macs, making Flashback roughly as common for Mac as Conficker was for Windows' - April 6, 2012 Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer at F-Secure, put it very well when he said that, proportionally, the Flashback Trojan was as widespread amongst Macs as the notorious Conficker worm had been amongst Windows-based PCs. The thing that surprised many of us was the scale of the botnet.

JavaScript code was used to load a Java-applet which exploited a vulnerability ( since patched). Macs were becoming infected with Flashback malware after users were redirected to a rogue website from a compromised site. Last week, there was a lot focus on the security of Apple Macs after the Russian security firm, Dr Web, revealed that they had found a botnet comprising over half a million infected Mac computers.