Flashback malware exposes big gaps in Apple security

A pair of high-profile malware attacks have given Apple a crash course in security response. Based on recent actions, 70 million current Mac owners have a right to expect much more from Apple than they’re getting today. In one of those great ironies of technology, an increased incidence of malware is a sign that your product has been a success in the market. Apple’s been astonishingly successful with its Mac hardware in recent years. The dark side of that success is the attention they’ve begun to attract from online criminals. Apple and its customers got a hint of what was in store with last year’s Mac Defender outbreak. This year, a much larger and more disturbing outbreak has infected more than 600,000 Macs with a piece of malware called Flashback.The entire Flashback episode has in fact exposed Apple’s security weak spots. Eugene Kaspersky last week argued that Apple is “ten years behind Microsoft in terms of security.” Those aren’t just self-serving statements from a company that sells security software. Kaspersky’s argument didn’t even mention antivirus solutions. Instead, he said, Apple’s security efforts have been slow, reactive, and generally ineffective: We now expect to see more and more because cyber criminals learn from success and this was the first successful one. [Apple] will understand very soon that they have the same problems Microsoft had ten or 12 years ago. They will have to make changes in terms of the cycle of updates and so on and will be forced to invest more into their security audits for the software. That’s what Microsoft did in the past after so many incidents like Blaster and the more complicated worms that infected millions of computers in a short time. They had to do a lot of work to check the code to find mistakes and vulnerabilities. Now it’s time for Apple [to do that]. Let’s be clear: Both Microsoft and Apple are victims of organized crime in all of these attacks, and they’re in the unenviable position of having to fight legal battles and make substantial engineering investments on behalf of their customers. It is, unfortunately, a cost of doing business.