27 April 2007

Security experts not surprised the Mac was hacked

"Security researcher Dino Dai Zovi sent a shudder through the Macintosh community late last week when he successfully hacked the Mac with an exploit that he sent to a friend attending the CanSecWest security conference. By gaining shell access to a Mac by pointing the Safari Web browser at a specially-constructed Web page, Dai Zovi won a $10,000 prize from 3Com’s Tipping Point division -- and took a lot of Mac users by surprise.

But if the news of a hacked Mac was alarming in some quarters, security experts say they aren’t the least bit shocked.

Most Mac users see their operating system as being much more secure than Windows. That’s true to a certain extent. But much of the Mac’s immunity from malicious attacks can be attributed to hackers going for the more widely used operating system to grab the most attention.

A Mac user since the release of Mac OS X, Dai Zovi has discovered local and remote vulnerabilities affecting Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix operating systems. While modern Unix-based systems like Linux and FreeBSD present the most difficulty for hacking, he praised Apple and Microsoft for the security improvements both companies have made."

Click on the link below for the full article:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9017945&source=NLT_VVR&nlid=37

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