Hackers and Apple make for a dangerous pair

 

Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard the argument “If you want a virus-free computer, get a Mac.”

Raise your other hand if, in response to a story I’ve blogged about regarding Windows security breaches, you’ve left a comment like that on Yahoo!

Now put your hands down, because, as CNN puts it bluntly, “Those days are over.”

It used to be that the Mac had a small share of the market, and its architecture was fundamentally different from its PC competition. No one wrote malware for the Mac because there just weren’t that many Macs around, and the way a modern malware creator works is through the law of large numbers: You infect a lot of computers to harvest a useful number of passwords, send a significant amount of spam, or otherwise wreak a substantial amount of chaos. This is why no one writes viruses for, say, the Amiga. What would be the point? There’s no money in it.

Now the world has changed. While Mac computers are still relatively rare (though not as rare as they once were), the iPhone and iPad have changed the game, and Apple — worth more on the market than Microsoft now — is a major player in the computer industry once again. And so the hackers have come out to play.

Last week’s headline-grabbing iPad hack is probably just the start.

Security will be a growing headache for Apple as the months wear on. The perception has always been that the Mac is a “safer” operating system by design, but in reality that is not the case. Plenty of exploits have been found for Mac security holes over the years, but the lack of hacks in the wild has kept users safe while the company patched the problems. In fact, Apple releases security patches just as often as Microsoft does, according to CNN; it just doesn’t make headlines when it does.