Black Hat 2015

dbm


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Mac Mini 2011 i5 2.3/8GB, MBPr 15 2013 with i7/16GB both running El Capitan
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chas_m

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Sounds like the environment has become more threatening but the sky isn't actually falling in yet...

I'd agree with this sentiment to a point. Black hatters tend to boast a lot. If it was really "trivial," we'd be seeing thousands of new threats each year, the way we do on Windows and Android.

But we're not. At best, there's maybe at any given time two or three threats that haven't yet been guarded against automatically either by XProtect updates or system patches. And that's just the Mac -- threats to iOS come along maybe once a year, if that. In both cases, they are more annoying than threatening, though some of them (one new one in particular) could have been serious but won't get the chance to become so.

So I'm inclined to dismiss his "trivial" comment as meaning it's trivial to write something that's meant to scare people (and that's true) -- but if it's so easy to do real harm, why is there no evidence of this?

Macs (like any Internet-connected device) can still be subject to adware, scareware, junkware and scamware, certainly -- thanks to users not being vigilant -- but the system(s) themselves (OS X and iOS) have proven over the past 14 years and seven years (respectively) to be the most resilient, resistant and secure consumer and mobile operating systems out there by a very long measure. There isn't even a close second when it comes to desktop OSes, though I think you might be able to argue that BlackBerry qualifies as robust and secure as well in the mobile space, at least as far as I know.
 

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