The Mac Malware Threat

Malware is every users nightmare, well perhaps mostly Windows users. Luckily, Mac users such as ourselves have been very fortunate to forego this problem area since as far back as we can remember. Naturally as Mac sales grow at a staggering rate year-over-year, the Mac becomes ever so ubiquitous.

From my own standpoint, I have never had such a cavalier attitude about security on OS X. I have never been so arrogant as to make any claims that this platform is invulnerable to exploits and/or malware. Over the past 5 years OS X in its many iterations has had some pretty glaring holes. Some of those holes have been patched by Apple at an unsatisfactory rate though.

One of the most annoying things that I find with OS X’s default configuration, is that it ships with the personal firewall turned off. This makes absolutely no sense and I don’t understand why this was never on by default, even in Snow Leopard. I’m going to hold my breath for Lion and hope that Apple has the good sense to make sure this is turned on and locked down by default. Power users like you and I will always know to go into our settings and turn this kind of stuff on, but I’m not worried about us. What I and Apple should be concerned with is the average Mac user who probably aren’t even aware that there is a built in firewall whatsoever.

Apple has brought security experts on board since the release of Snow Leopard, so I imagine during Lion’s development they have been doing far more penetration testing. This of course is a win not only for users, but for Apple itself. The less bad PR and issues they face, mean they look better as well to the public. To elucidate on this further, I’m in no way making a statement that OS X is going to be the next Windows as far as security issues are concerned — I’m merely stating that there are going to be more ongoing issues and Apple will need to pay closer attention and work harder to ensure their operating systems are shipped as locked down by default as they can possibly make it — without having a negative impact on the user experience.