Apple is vulnerable

Apple should do more regarding security, even though people believe its operating system (OS) is not vulnerable to security threats and more secure than Microsoft's Windows. This is according to Haroon Meer, technical director of SensePost, who addressed the ITWeb Security Summit, in Midrand, this week.

Meer believes vulnerability counts cannot be used to establish which operating system – for Mac or PC – is more vulnerable. It depends on what bugs are counted into the vulnerability counts, and the companies are not comparing the same bugs in their counts at the moment, he explained.

Using the “I love you” worm, which killed many a mail server, as an example, Meer showed Mac was just as vulnerable as the Windows PC OS. Using non-executable stack solutions, both Vista and OS X have protection, and looking at attacks against the heap, specifically heap spraying attacks where hackers are filling the heap with nonsensical code, Microsoft is protected, while Mac is not, he pointed out.