Mac Security Situation is Getting Worse

In a recent ZDNet article by Emil Protalinski (Apple ‘10 years behind Microsoft in terms of security’), he talks about history repeating.

“Apple is now entering the same world as Microsoft has been in for more than 10 years: updates, security patches and so on,” Kaspersky said. “We now expect to see more and more because cyber criminals learn from success and this was the first successful one. They 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].”

That being said, Kaspersky, both the man and his company, of course would benefit from a malware epidemic on the Mac. That’s important to keep in mind, while acknowledging that the numbers are indeed growing and the Mac security situation is getting worse. Just how bad it’s getting, and will get, is a matter of perspective.

Lots of people see Macs as inevitably sneaking into the enterprise through an IPad foothold. Should that play out or not, there’s a reality to the enterprise field; it’s around stability, support, backwards compatibility, and – as we see in this article – it’s security. I wonder if Apple can play ball?