Nictopia - Prevent Diseases, Wrap Your Mac

Wednesday, April 8, 2009: 5:31PM

Prevent Diseases, Wrap Your Mac

Recently The New York Times ran an article about how Macs aren’t safer than Windows machines, just are a smaller target. I jumped out of my seat, shrugged my shoulders, lifted up my hands, relaxed my wrists, and condescendingly said, “Duh!” This was followed by thanking NYT for stating the obvious.

Last month, March 2009, Windows machines accounted for 88.14% of online activity, Mac accounted for 9.77%, and Linux was 0.90%. Mildly humorous is the IPhone was 0.49% of web activity, more than half of the Linux activity. Any hoot, seeing as how Macs account for less than 1/9th of the activity that Windows produces, what reason would a virus developer have for developing a virus? If he or she wanted to affect the most machines then he or she would attack Windows. The only reason someone would target Mac is if they had an obsessive hatred for Macs or an ex-girl(boy)friend owned a Mac. Either way, the reason Macs are safer is because of the lack of viruses for them. Using that reasoning to say anything is safer would make Linux look more locked down than Fort Knox.

However, there has been a trend going that Mac users need to be wary of. The activity from Windows’ machines has dropped 3% and Mac has increased 2% since May 2008. Why does this matter to Mac users? Well, with a greater market, and the pompous attitude Mac users have about Macs being safer, Macs are seeming more appealing to Hackers. But luckily for Mac, it is built from a Unix foundation, right?

According to the NYT article Mac OSX had 26 vulnerabilities compared to Vista’s 27. Also, at the 2009 PWN2Own contest, the Macbook fell to a security flaw within seconds of the contest’s start. Sure, being a PC owner I may have said, “Take that hipsters!” More importantly, and pertaining to my next point, I was guilty of being a smug jerk about the NYT article when I first read it. Now I can’t help but feel like everything I’ve known about computing has crumbled. I thought Unix machines were virtually impossible to penetrate. When I think about it, that simple fact is devastating news. Macs are Unix based, so do their vulnerabilities reflect vulnerabilities in Unix, or has Macintosh gotten that lazy, due to the lack of viruses, when writing their OS? What does that say about Linux? Is Linux only so secure because it represents less than 0.9% of the market?

Yikes, I feel like I don’t know anything anymore.

As for having anti-virus software on your Mac, I wouldn’t worry about it yet. Again, there isn’t enough Mac viruses out there right now to justify paying $49.99+ on a software package. As long as you keep your computer up to date with the updates Mac releases, then you should be alright, for now.

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