In this article/interview with Kiwi Mark Borrie, he reminds users that security considerations are important no matter which platform you run on, and not to be lulled into a false sense of security just because most viruses are written for Windows.
I thought that the description for the Renepo exploit was pretty interesting. Here is a synopsis:
Dubbed Renepo (alias Opener), Ducklin said the malware: “turns off system accounting, turns off the OS 10 firewall, turns off auto updates, turns file-sharing on, opens an SSH back door, downloads and installs an open source video conferencing program and opens it in ‘do not advise the user mode’.”
The article also suggests that Microsoft has surpassed Apple in terms of their approach to addressing security issues as a company. I’ve seen a lot of what MS has been doing internally to support this, in terms of making huge (schedule impacting) priority changes in the dev plans on almost all of their products. Don’t know anything about what Apple is doing, but I do seem to hear a lot of the (false) assumption that it’s automatically secure because it’s based on *nix now, and/or there aren’t as many viruses etc. written for it. This article does a pretty good job of explaining why that’s the wrong way to think about it.
One Comment
Too bad it didn’t say that the malware never affected anyone.
Here is a contradictory article.
Something your article didn’t do (I think) is compare 10.1 to XP SP2 which a lot of writers do. Which is like comparing windows 98 SE to XP SP2.