A flame war was started early this week with news that Symantec had suggested that “Apple’s OS X operating system is increasingly becoming a target for hackers and malware authors”, in its annual Internet Security Threat Report. Now normally, making a comment like this about an operating system is passé. Let’s face it, aren’t all computer systems increasingly becoming a target for hackers and malware. I should also point out, that the statements only consume 3/4 of a page, in a 96 page document. It seems like a passing comment.

The reason this particular comment has caused such a flurry of press and blog traffic stems from some false reports and is rooted firmly in religion. The news even had an enterprising hardware manufacturer throwing down the gauntlet and offering a $25,000 prize for the first virus to infect two modern OS X Macs, until a few Mac security experts suggested that OS X wasn’t invulnerable. Don’t get me wrong, everyone who listens to the podcast knows I’m a Mac user, and I work for Sun Microsystems, so I know all about religious OS wars and security.

So what’s the truth. OS X is of course vulnerable. It’s pretty hard to write a few million lines of code and not have a few bugs or holes. It’s also true that “hackers” aren’t as concerned with operating systems with smaller market share. Why would they, they’re better off targeting a 95% monopoly. That said, I won’t be rushing out to buy Symantec’s scanning software. I’ve got a good degree of faith in the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) based core of the operating system. I’ll give it some time and wait for the news that a real piece of malware is roaming the wild, and execute common sense when opening any applications.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 27th, 2005 at 9:13 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.