Monday, January 24, 2011

Apple_Security++

Recent hires by Apple reveal an increasing emphasis on security. The rise of mac malwarebotnets, and research in mobile attacks indicate the need for Apple to take security seriously. Genius hackers like Charlie Miller and Dino Dai Zovi have already been researching Mac vulnerabilities for some time now, and many more are on the way. Hopefully this influx will introduce more tools. Good tools are already available—IDA Pro was recently released natively for OS X—but we need more freely available tools to fuel research and open the doors to more researchers (such as poor students like myself). OS X needs tools like OllyDbg and Immunity debugger. Paterva needs to hurry up—I can't wait any longer. It's an exciting time to be a Mac. Let the fun begin.

3 comments:

Warren Lemmon said...

You're right: Apple needs to up its security. New attacks happen daily, and Apple should be designing its software with security in mind from the get go.

Andy said...

Many Apple owners think that Apple computers are inherently more secure that PCs. A friend erroneously told me that Apple computers were unhackable. But in reality, there's just far fewer people who actually take the time to hack Apple computers. It's refreshing? to hear that more people are trying to get in on it.

Jason said...

@Warren, exactly. And doing it with security in the mind from the get-go will save them a lot of pain in the end.

@Andy, haha, unhackable? Yeah, OS X is actually _less_ secure than Windows, i.e., in the sense that it has less advanced security features for the most part. Of course the reason, as you mentioned, is that Windows is a much more profitable target due to its dominance.