US Army going Apple

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. ...

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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

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

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

mac0s9user said:

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

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my thoughts exactly

This should work well unless they try to copy files.

mac0s9user said:

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

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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.

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

Good news.

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

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

Army buys Macs to stop Hacks

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.

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Full article at forbes.com

Sorry, but http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=89342

*Merged same topic threads*

rman said:

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

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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.

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...

Finely the US Army is doing something right. Wish the UK Army would also switch to mac's as well.

baggss said:

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.

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I have read a long time ago, about a Navy ship that was shutdown due to a problem with Microsoft windows. I have worked on military contracts in the past and we also used some form of Unix.

rman said:

I have read a long time ago, about a Navy ship that was shutdown due to a problem with Microsoft windows. I have worked on military contracts in the past and we also used some form of Unix.

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A true story. They had to be towed back into port. It was an NT issue with an App trying to divide by zero for some thing or another and all heck breaking loose.

That's pretty interesting news. I'm actually looking into a military-related job with DFAS here in Indianapolis, but for the type of work I would be doing I suppose we would be stuck with Windows to due to software necessities.

I just read somewhere that M$ replaced the NT servers with Solaris servers for running Hotmail services..... how do we trust something which the maker itself doesn't trust.