Thursday, July 17, 2008

Macintosh and security

There seem to be two reasons that people buy Macs instead of PCs: easier to use and better security. The second reason may get tested, if things keep going the way they are:
"According to Gartner and IDC, Apple now has between 7.8 and 8.5% of market share. While those numbers are not astonishing, they are not insignificant, and their growth does not seem to be slowing down.
While Mac has a better security architecture, some of the reason that there isn't so much malware targeting it is that there aren't nearly as many Macs as PCs. Combine easier attacks with more targets, and Windows becomes an irresistable magnet for Bad Guys.

So what happens if Macintosh market share doubles? Does that installed base attract criminalized malware? We may get a chance to see.

In the meantime, let's be careful out there.

2 comments:

  1. TamJuly 18, 2008 at 10:59 AM

    "So what happens if Macintosh market share doubles?"

    We keep running obsolete versions of the Mac OS.

    It'd take a bored hacker to make a serious run at OS 9.2. ;)

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  2. BorepatchJuly 18, 2008 at 11:02 AM

    Gee, Tam - that sounds like a challenge! ;-)

    Actually, hacking Mac 9.x and lower is a lot like attacking Windows 98 - not much in the way of network-reachable services.

    The *browser*, on the other hand, it likely a target-rich environment.

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