Both Mac OS X and Windows maintain blacklists of known malware and throw up warnings in our browsers in an attempt to prevent us from downloading dangerous things, or at least to alert us when we do. We haven’t had a lot of good ways to protect ourselves from nasty downloads. Attackers know that even the most paranoid of us can’t identify every possible threat, and they use sophisticated techniques to trick us into running malicious software on our computers. We Are the Weakest Link - I used to tell people they were safe as long as they stayed out of the shadowy neighborhoods of the Internet, but danger is everywhere these days. It could be the key to preventing a future malware epidemic. It’s a major new advance in operating system security designed to reduce dramatically the ability of an attacker to trick users into installing malicious software.
OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion includes a transformative security technology called Gatekeeper. It’s a problem we haven’t had very good solutions for… until now.
So for physical and network attacks, we Mac users are in pretty good shape.īut the third kind of attack? Well that’s a bit of a problem, since we humans, even the most paranoid of us, can fall prey to trickery. Up-to-date Macs are reasonably secure against direct network attacks, and when vulnerabilities do crop up, a combination of anti-exploitation features makes it a lot harder for the bad guys (at least on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion). If you use a strong password and encrypt your hard disk using FileVault, only a sophisticated attacker can get in. Macs are reasonably well protected against two of the three. There are three ways to attack a computer - gain physical access, hit it over the network, or trick the user into running something they shouldn’t.
#MACOS MALWARE YEARS RUNONLY AVOID FIVE PORTABLE#
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