Securemac.com Dispels Safety Myths at Macworld SF

The SecureMac team had an opportunity to talk to many people at the Expo, and dispel the commonly held belief that there isn't any spyware attacking Macintosh computers.

(PRWEB) March 13, 2006 -- SecureMac.com (http://www.securemac.com) was pleased to attend this year's MacWorld SF, where they released the latest version of their security software, MacScan 2.0, designed to detect and remove spyware from Mac OS X. The SecureMac team had an opportunity to talk to many people at the Expo, and dispel the commonly held belief that there isn't any spyware attacking Macintosh computers.

While Rebecca Freed comments on how much more secure Mac OS X is than MS Windows in her article
(http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/02/06/security/index.php), she also notes that she "checked out a spyware scanner from Securemac.com called MacScan 2.0, after speaking with the vendor at Macworld Expo and secretly thinking 'Yeah, right. Mac spyware. Show me, dude.' What the vendor showed (her) was a list of programs that its system had been intentionally infected with."

As OS X becomes more popular among the general public, it is also is becoming more popular among those examining its security with both good and bad motives. The recent ShmooCon hacking conference underscored this fact, as a security consultant has his up-to-date and locked down PowerBook broken in to, and a file server installed on it by an unknown attacker. Robert Lemos, reporting on the conference (http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11375), stated that "the number of vulnerabilities logged in Apple's Mac OS X surpassed the number of vulnerabilities found in Microsoft's Windows XP in 2004 and 2005, according to data from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Apple had to contend with 88 vulnerabilities (29 high severity ones) in the Mac OS X in 2005, up from 54 in the prior year, while Microsoft patched 61 vulnerabilities (38 deemed of high severity) in Windows XP in 2005, up from 44 the prior year, according to the NVD. The data does show that fewer of the flaws in Mac OS X were considered severe."

According to the SecureMac team, the majority of the people at the MacWorld SF conference had no clue that spyware even existed for Mac OS X. They were able, however, to demonstrate some of the spyware currently in the wild, and also demonstrate how MacScan 2.0 protects against it.

Since MacWorld SF, there have been a number of security threats to OS X appearing in the wild. OS X now has three Worms that have made news headlines: OSX/Leap-A, OSX/Inqtana-A, and OSX/Inqtana-B. Also, a new security hole (see http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/02/21/safari/index.php) enables worms and spyware to be installed in the background just by visiting a malicious website. According to http://itvibe.com/news/3946/ there is increased interest in writing malware for the OS X platform, now that working code has been released to the public.

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