Apple under attack: Flashback gives the flashbacks to sloppy security management from the company – Part 2

There were times when Mac machines were considered one of the most secure platforms in the world, if not the most secure. However, gone are the days when users could blind trust Apple products in terms of secure operating systems.

The main reason attached to such vulnerability to malware attacks is the sales of Mac machines in the last two to three years. The more the people purchase Macs, the more are the chances to detect the loopholes.

In this particular instance, the weak point that malware writers were targeting was Java, a technology Apple hasn’t included out of the box on its computers since 2010, but that it supports with its own releases. The runtime is used from anything from enterprise applications to popular 3D games like Minecraft. In November 2010, when announcing plans for the OpenJDK project, Apple said it would continue to maintain these versions through Lion, but that Java SE 7 and beyond would be handled and distributed by Oracle.

“As more people buy and use Macs, we’ll see more malware,” Charlie Miller, a principal research consultant for Accuvant Labs, said. “Part of it too is that it’s a Java vulnerability, and the actual exploit is OS independent, so (malware writers) didn’t have to know how to write an OS X exploit.”

Paul Ferguson, a senior threat researcher at Trend Micro, forecasts another threat to the Mac machines. The HTML 5.0, that Apple, Microsoft and other web browsers are developing, also seems to be prone to the same disease as Java in Macs. However, this time, it will not be Mac OS X but other operating systems as well.

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Posted by Usman Khalid on Apr 9 2012. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.