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I have never really liked Apple as a company or the products they produce. I believe everything is overpriced for what you actually get. Personal opinions aside, it seems many people are switching over to Apple Mac hardware and the latest and, apparently greatest, Mac OS X Leopard. For many years, Microsoft has had a massive majority of the operating systems market. In July 2003, w3schools.com reported Microsoft having a 93% market share, with Apple dwindling behind, with only a 1.9% market share. In April 2008, Microsoft had a 87.8% market share and Apple had a 4.6% market share. The rise of Apple is clearly a slow one but it is certainly happening.

Moving swiftly away from dodgy statistics and on to the main point of this article. Yesterday, 12th May 2008, I found myself drawn in to helping a Mac user with a strange problem. It seemed that whenever they went to a site which didn’t exist, they were actually shown a bunch of adverts. This is clearly malware-esque behaviour. As I have said, I am not a Mac user and I don’t have the first clue as of how to use one - however I have managed UNIX derived servers for the past few years. Luckily, Apple scrapped their own core a few years ago to use that of The Berkeley Software Distribution, BSD. This was directly based off UNIX code. With a bit of walking the user through debugging on the command line, I found that the DNS server file, /etc/resolv.conf had been modified to use a DNS server in The Ukraine. After some digging around and talking to some malware experts, the malware was identified as this.

Of course, as with most malware on any OS in this day and age, the infection was caused by the stupidity of the user. However, this highlighted to me, two very important points. Firstly, Mac OS is not secure. I am constantly ranted at by Mac users that, because it uses an extremely good kernel, BSD, that it is secure. For this programme to modify /etc/resolv.conf, the installer must have been given root privileges on the system. This is extremely worrying as one of the great advantages of UNIX derived systems is that you can delete files that are in use. This means that any installer file could very easily wipe your hard disk without hassle. Secondly, this highlighted to me that malware makers finally have decided that it’s worth making malware for Mac. Many Mac users have always been deluded, by the fact malware makers have never been bothered to make malware for an OS which is so under used, into thinking that Mac is secure and protected from malware attack. Over the past 10 or so years, many people have developed tools and helped Windows users remove malware. There is nobody around to help Mac users in the same situation. I firmly believe that, as the market share of Apple’s operating system grows, so will the amount of malware being created for it. This will cast all Mac users back to the Stone Age and leave them as a proverbial sitting duck for malware makers to exploit. Perhaps it’s time Apple stop brainwashing people with Mac vs PC ads and actually start to take a pro-active approach to malicious software removal before it’s too late.

Phil L

This post was submitted by Phil.

Tags: Age, Apple, articles, attack, exploit, finals, infection, Mac, malware, marketing, Microsoft, Opinion, Produce, Product, reporter, security, Software, time

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