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Conclusion

Mac OS X has for the most part, com­pared to other oper­at­ing sys­tems, enjoyed a care­free his­tory when it comes to secu­rity. There are cer­tainly many vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, but rel­a­tively few known exploits for them. There are also almost no exam­ples of attacks in the wild. The few attacks that researchers have noted in the wild, although highly pub­li­cized, are mostly harm­less. This how­ever should not be taken as evi­dence that OS X is dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble to attack.

One area where OS X clearly scores high marks is its out of the box secu­rity. The design deci­sion to take a con­ser­v­a­tive approach to secu­rity is cer­tainly a good one. There is room for improve­ment though. Most notably, the fire­wall should be enabled by default and it should be harder for users to run admin user accounts for day-​to-​day use. The secu­rity improve­ments in Leop­ard are a good step for­ward, but still need to be improved on as well.

What is unde­ni­able about OS X secu­rity is that it has yet to be exploited on a large scale. When the OSX.Leap.A was dis­cov­ered in Feb­ru­ary 2006, many people pro­claimed that it would be a water­shed event, and that Mac users were no longer safe from viruses. It has been nearly two years since then, and there are still no large-​scale virus out­breaks for OS X. In fact, in a recent secu­rity report by Sophos, senior tech­nol­ogy con­sul­tant Graham Cluley stated, “…hackers seem happy to pri­mar­ily target Win­dows users and not spread their wings to other plat­forms. It seems likely that Macs will con­tinue to be the safer place for com­puter users for some time to come - some­thing that home users may wish to con­sider if they’re delib­er­at­ing about the next com­puter they should purchase.” Given the source, a senior con­sul­tant at a well-​known secu­rity firm, this is a remark­able statement.

Even though OS X has an excel­lent secu­rity record, it is impor­tant to rec­og­nize that it has yet to stand up to the kind of secu­rity beat­ing that oper­at­ing sys­tems like Win­dows XP have. Win­dows holds some­where around 90% of the PC market, making it an immense target for hack­ers. Microsoft did not have the ben­e­fit of obscu­rity work­ing for it in the case of Win­dows, as OS X most cer­tainly does.

It is impor­tant that Apple, and OS X users, not become com­pla­cent about secu­rity. As OS X becomes more pop­u­lar, so will its attrac­tive­ness to hack­ers. Secu­rity is an ever chang­ing and increas­ingly com­plex field, and Apple will have to con­tinue to steadily improve its oper­at­ing system to keep ahead. For the time being though, OS X does indeed seem to be ‘more secure.’

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