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Thursday, May 26, 2011

Apple users, welcome to the real world!

If you have not be told Apple has virus, you should read this excellent piece of report on "Mac Defender" malware. As a realist, I have always laughed when Apple users naively believing the sales hype that it does not virus!

I have been following this Mac Defender for a long time, way before the popular media outlets picked up the story. When I first heard of this, I realized that apple users' age of innocence had just been shattered. My warning to my friends and view on the vulnerability of these unrealistically complacent apple users would be like pack of drunken sheep to the wolf. Surprisingly this same sentiment is echoed by Molly Wood in CNet. As a developer, software bounds to have vulnerability as it is crafted by human. Besides, Apple OS is just a Unix and Unix/Linux is always known to be malware/virus.

I believe it will become a lot worse before it gets some form of relief because these attackers have sharpened its modi operandi in the Windows world and that Windows users are conditioned to become more alert about Virus/Trojan/Malware. To these attackers, Apple users are trusting lot!

I am not surprised to learn of the recommended "unhelpful" customer service directive of Apple as reported. Molly has outlined several notable exemplars of Apple's unhelpfulness. The "silence-then-solution pattern" will definitely put their users at great risk through Apple's generosity of giving attackers a wide windows of attack opportunity. Does Apple care? I doubt it. The old "Poison DNS attack" and Apple's slowness in addressing this is just another shiny example of a company cares more about a facade than what's behind and its users well beings.

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