Welcome to the party - the Mac gets hacked!

At the end of February, the bad news first arrived. OS X had a new Trojan and it was stealing passwords.

Since then, the story has been developing. As of early April, over 600,000 Mac's had been infected. Apple responded by issuing an update on April 12th which would remove the nasty trojan. Hopefully, those applying the update realize that they should also be changing all of their passwords as well.

So, what changed? Well, there are certainly a lot more Mac's out there then there were a few years ago so there is more value in hacking the machine. Reading the CNET article, one worries that some Mac users may be going through the denial stage. Maybe these users thought Mac's couldn't be attacked?

In May 2006, as part of the great "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" ad campaign with John Hodgman and Justin Long, there was an ad which suggested just that. See Trust Mac. Hodgman (the PC) states that "it is not very safe out for me now.You understand? There's a lot of spyware out there." Long (the Mac) says "I run Mac OS X. So I don't have to worry about your spyware and viruses.". The thing is, this was an ad... Nothing else.... and the article below suggests that Apple has some work to do.

Since 2006, Apple increased the Mac's North American marketshare by almost 10%; growing to about 15% today. As well, this 15% are also people willing to pay more for their computers. There is no such thing as a cheap Mac. So, unlike 2006, this is now a market worth targeting and if the news is any indication, this is just starting.

So, now Apple gets to follow the Microsoft model of frequent security updates and continual hardening of the OS. Users face more hassles with installing and managing AV software and life gets harder for those developing on the platform.

Of course, Evizone develops its software for both the PC and the Mac. In particular, our patent pending anti-screen capture software is a highly technical and continual project. In the early days of Evizone, we hired a team of ethical hackers to attack our software and service. The end result of this was a considerable investment into hardening our software. The challenge in doing this work is recognizing that when you are done, the user will not know that you did anything.

For years, design and UI have been a key focus of the Mac. Now, due to their success, Apple gets to spend more time on things their users will never see. Welcome to the party!

CNET, April 25, 2012 - Kaspersky: Mac security is '10 years behind Microsoft'

"They will understand very soon that they have the same problems Microsoft had 10 or 12 years ago," Kaspersky said in an interview. "They will have to make changes in terms of the cycle of updates and so on and will be forced to invest more into their security audits for the software."...Read further