« iPod Shuffles To The Cheap Side | Main | China's Totalitarianism: What's In It For Us »
Hackers To Apple: No More Hiding Behind Your Puny Market Share
Computers | Feb 23, 06
There was a time when the Mac faithful could console themselves that there was safety in their iconoclastic choice in computing platform. As part of only five percent of the market, there just weren't enough of them to attract the attention of hackers, a point even the Pentagon was said to take into account in its choice of servers. But having a Tiger on your hard drive may no longer guarantee your security.
This week, three different worms were discovered boring into Apples, including one specifically targeting iChat, as well as a zipped graphic e-mail attachment and one that zeros in on a Mac's Bluetooth connection. Why the sudden interest in tormenting Cupertino's loyalists? Maybe the rise of another Apple product with far more formidable market share (and perhaps more importantly, mind share) has something to do with it, that being of course the iPod. While not all iPod users have Macs, a great many Mac users have iPods, and messing with the machine on which those iTunes are accessed and backed up may now be too tempting a target to ignore. And now that the iPod has reminded the world that the Mac OS exists, perhaps that operating system's architecture will make it attractive prey, given that it's built around the Unix kernel that old-school crackers know so well. So, oddly, even those Mac users who've never listened to music on little white earbuds may wind up paying a price for the ubiquitous iPod.
Posted by jeffrey.trester (Permalink)
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blog.pricescan.com/mtsystem/mt-tb.cgi/97
