12-21-2007, 03:48 PM

Apples For The Army.

... Wallington, a division chief in the Army's office of enterprise information systems, says the military is quietly working to integrate Macintosh computers into its systems to make them harder to hack. That's because fewer attacks have been designed to infiltrate Mac computers, and adding more Macs to the military's computer mix makes it tougher to destabilize a group of military computers with a single attack, Wallington says.

This past year was a particularly tough one for military cybersecurity. Cyberspies infiltrated a Pentagon computer system in June and stole unknown quantities of e-mail data, according to a September report by the Financial Times. ...

12-21-2007, 03:55 PM

Awesome! I would love to see a picture of a meeting with all of the generals and the President using a MacBook and a projector and all of them smiling because it actually works

12-21-2007, 03:58 PM

Hmmm.... I just get this mental picture of a lovely iMac sitting in some grungy pit somewhere firing off missiles - just doesn't seem right, Macs are too "happy" for that sort of thing

12-21-2007, 04:12 PM

Will this lead to an increase of viruses and hacks for macs? I fear it will

12-21-2007, 04:41 PM

Originally Posted by mac0s9user

Will this lead to an increase of viruses and hacks for macs? I fear it will

my thoughts exactly

12-21-2007, 05:32 PM

This should work well unless they try to copy files.

12-21-2007, 06:02 PM

Originally Posted by mac0s9user

Will this lead to an increase of viruses and hacks for macs? I fear it will

Diversity makes everyone more secure.

Right now, one well-made hack can take down 90% of the world. Best not to put all your eggs in one basket.

12-21-2007, 06:04 PM

I have not heard anyone hacking AIX, IRIX, Sun OS, Solairs or HP-UX.

12-21-2007, 06:12 PM

Good news.

12-21-2007, 08:50 PM

Bad idea... the glowing Apple will totally get you shot.

It wouldn't be difficult to talk me into a kevlar MacBook Pro though!

12-22-2007, 12:39 AM

Given Apple's marketing toward the young and the trendy, you wouldn't expect the U.S. Army to be much of a customer. Lieutenant Colonel C.J. Wallington is hoping hackers won't expect it either.

Wallington, a division chief in the Army's office of enterprise information systems, says the military is quietly working to integrate Macintosh computers into its systems to make them harder to hack. That's because fewer attacks have been designed to infiltrate Mac computers, and adding more Macs to the military's computer mix makes it tougher to destabilize a group of military computers with a single attack, Wallington says.

Full article at forbes.com

12-22-2007, 03:25 AM

Sorry, but US Army going Apple

12-22-2007, 09:23 AM

*Merged same topic threads*

12-22-2007, 12:51 PM

Originally Posted by rman

I have not heard anyone hacking AIX, IRIX, Sun OS, Solairs or HP-UX.

You would be amazed at how much of the militaries infrastructure for Command & Control is based on UNIX or LINUX. There is a reason for that.

12-22-2007, 02:03 PM

I can tell you that I would be ecstatic if the end user got a new system to use. Right now we use Windows 2000 (just upgraded this time last year from NT 4.0) and they have layers upon layers of security software, keyloggers, image capture programs, etc. installed - and the "new" computers are slower than the old ones (nevermind the "new" computers have only 512MB RAM and the old ones had 1GB.... I digress). All of the security software + the lack of RAM makes it impossible to get anything done. Between basic Office apps (Word, Excel, Outlook, etc.) you can't switch between apps, and once you are in one app, it is almost as if everything is running on a remote server via dialup...