Who’s the FUDdiest of them all?

Yes, we take great pleasure in dealing with purveyors of the old fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Please welcome, for your enjoyment, Pushpa Sathish, a staff writer for the Network Security Journal, and his piece: Mac(ing) Your System Secure—wait is that “macing”? Like, with a mace? Never mind.

As a writer, I can tell you that the most important thing is to really grab people with your opening line—drill your point home.

There’s nothing more challenging to the hacker than the challenge of a new challenge.

I’m getting something about a “challenge,” yes?

Trust me, it only gets better.

Mac users have been turned into sitting ducks with Apple’s cocksure attitude that their systems are hacker-proof, if you can call them that. What they haven’t understood till today is that their machines are not the Fort Knox of the computer world, they’re just under the impression that they are!

We’re sitting ducks! My computer isn’t Fort Knox! Oh no!

The reason for this misconception? Hackers are less inclined to target Mac machines since a trifling of the world’s population uses them…

Oh good old Uncle Marketshare. He’s my favorite uncle, you know.

But of late, the scenario is shifting and the spotlight is on Macintosh and its Apple operating systems. Hackers are looking for newer playgrounds and have found an untapped gold mine at Mac.

Am I the only one perplexed about the whole marketshare argument? Mac critics will argue until they’re blue in the face that Apple’s marketshare is pitiful and tiny and that’s what prevents Macs from getting viruses. But wait…if the Mac is starting to get more viruses now, does that mean our marketshare is no longer pitiful and tiny? You’re going to have to cede ground somewhere, fellows.

Sathish follows this with three points that he suggests illustrate that Apple has become the “newest bull’s eye for the hackers’ darts” (we must do something about this barbaric practice of hurling darts at the eyes of cattle, don’t you agree?):

According to McAfee, the number of vulnerabilities found in Macintosh increased 228 percent in the two-year period between 2003 and 2005; Microsoft had an increase of only 78 percent in the same term.

Yeah, that’s a lot. Sathish doesn’t bother linking to the actual McAfee study (PDF link), which does indeed show that Apple went from 45 vulnerabilities in 2003 to 143. Microsoft in fact had only a 73% increase, going from 92 vulnerabilities to 159. So though Apple’s rate of growth may be higher, OS X still has fewer reported vulnerabilities. It’s also worthwhile to note that while McAfee says it has logged 76 viruses target at the Mac OS, 71 of those pre-date OS X—only five have been found since 2001.

The first worm specially written for Mac OS X, OSX/Leap.A, was discovered in February 2006. Security vendor Internet Security Systems (ISS) reports that the number of vulnerabilities found for Mac this May was threefold that for Microsoft.

Again, no link to the research itself, and I failed to dig it up after much searching on ISS’s site. So let’s proceed with the assumption that this is true: we still don’t know the numbers. If there were three vulnerabilities for the Mac and one for Windows, okay, but what about relative severity? Need more data!

Apple video iPods were found to have been infected by RavMonE, a Windows virus, in October.

Pssst: it’s a Windows virus. It doesn’t affect Macs. It came from an infected Windows machine in the assembly plant’s testing lab and affected less than 25 machines.

For argument’s sake, let’s just say that Mac users are in fact secure because of their underlying OS, at least more secure than Microsoft’s minions, this utopia will not last for long, predicts Peter Lindstrom of market research group Burton Group. Why? Because attackers are focusing more on application holes rather than OS vulnerabilities. This effectively means that all computer users are at equal risk, whether they use a Mac or not!

Well, this is the closest he’s gotten to right. All platforms are getting more conscious about security. The real threats these days are platform independent: phishing, identity theft, etc. That said, it’s gracious of him to toss off that acknowledgment of OS X’s possible superiority there. Thanks, appreciate it.

Yes, it’s another hatchet job on the state of Mac security. I am impressed, though. He didn’t mention Macarena or the AirPort Wi-Fi hack. That’s almost a step up in my book. But, to return to the headline for just one moment: none of this has anything to do with “macing” your computer secure. It’s just criticism; at least go constructive and suggest some ways for Mac users to protect themselves from these threats, instead of taunting them like some playground bully or, well, Elmer Fudd. And you call yourself a “security journal.” Shameful.