Apple growth attracted the attention of malware

The more Apple developed and the more its products penetrated deeper into the business market, the more likely it was to be attacked by attackers. That is the warning of security experts on Apple's current development trend.

According to industry analyst Gartner, Apple sold more than 1 million Mac OS X devices in the fourth quarter of 2007, up nearly 300,000 from the fourth quarter of 2006. Apple's US market share in 2007 increased by 6% compared to 2006 - reaching 28%.

At the Macworld Expo conference last week, CEO Steve Jobs announced that Apple had sold 4 million iPhones, and 5 million copies of the Leopard operating system (Mac OS X 10.5). This is considered the best development speed for many years.

However, malware researchers and industry analysts are warning about the trend when Apple products become popular, they will face new security risks.

" Microsoft Windows was bombarded because it was more popular than the Mac OS. And when Apple products followed this trend, it faced similar obstacles ," said the director of security research. David Marcus of McAfee.

Vulnerability in Mac

Recently, Apple's QuickTime application has been hacked. At the same time, the MacSweeper malware removal tool also became a target for hackers. In addition, other software in Mac OS is also in sight.

David Maynor, Errata Security's security director, says there is another area where hackers can attack Mac OS through vulnerabilities in some of the old open source libraries of the platform.

Apple is very late in fixing vulnerabilities in code libraries, such as the Samba network protocol used in Mac OS X. Even if the Samba open source community has its own patch for the vulnerability, Apple must It takes 3 to 4 months to produce an official patch. This will be a great opportunity for hackers to examine Apple products.

"Malware" watching Apple

Maynor said he noticed a wave of Apple underground mining operations since several QuickTime vulnerabilities were released last year.

According to statistics from some security companies, the number of Mac OS vulnerabilities in 2007 is higher than Microsoft Windows - nearly 5 times higher. In addition, Mac OS vulnerabilities are often processed slower than Windows.

Even the Apple-safe iPhone suffers from many dangerous attacks. It will be very dangerous if the iPhone is attacked by the number of products sold to the market is growing.