Jan

22

I noticed today that Infoworld has an article about Apple and their increasing market share.

“However, malware researchers and industry analysts warn that as the sheer number of Apple end-point devices in use worldwide rise, so will the security concerns tied to the company’s products.”

This brought to mind a comment when I was doing my graduate school work. One of the professors at a presentation I was making on the Morris Internet Worm remarked that “Maples don’t get Dutch Elm Disease.” The point being sometimes diversity is good.

Sexual reproduction in nature evolved for a reason. Populations evolve with different gene pools, and those gene pools are recombined and remixed with every individual that comes along (if you’re doing it right…). That helps them survive attacks from bacteria and viruses, and also to provide them with that occasional mutation that gives them the edge to survive. Just take a look at the evolution of drug-resistant germs in order to get a view of this process in fast-forward.

Windows-based computers used to be the primary targets of all kinds of malware, and still are due to their popularity. But as other platforms become more prevalent, then they suffer the fate of rising above the radar: they become targets in proportion to their popularity. While the Mac can claim some resistance to these sorts of attacks (justifiably, I think) based on it’s *NIX heritage and the better compartmentalization of permissions, that’s at least partly irrelevant. The theater of action has changed.

Today, malware hides in application space just as much as in the OS space. And that’s a much more difficult problem to solve, as the number of applications is obviously bigger than the number of OSes on which they live. All it takes is for one developer to make a mistake in his code to create an opening through which malware can pass.

The days of blithely dismissing malware for today’s darlings (the Mac, the iPhone, and all those other highly connected devices) are numbered.
Update

Speak of the devil… Malicious MMS worm hits Nokia handsets

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