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• Security

  Macs are NOT hack-proof. They are not inherently more secure than Windows PCs. In real-world use, however, OS X is more secure. Why is that so? Myth #1: The average Mac OS user may be more tech savvy than the average Windows user and less likely to succumb to social engineering. This may actually be true. Before you fire off that email to complain, keep in mind that the Tom’s Hardware audience isn’t the average Windows user. You’re at the upper echelon of the group that builds PCs, keeps up with the latest technology trends, and does its own research before making a tech purchase. I’m not saying that Mac users are smarter than Windows users. Just the averages. If you think about the ubiquity of computers in North America, Europe, and Asia, then the average Windows user should in fact be close to the 50 percentile for the global population. If you think you’re better than 50 percentile, then you, too, are better than the average. If you look at the market, it makes sense. US Census data has long shown the association between level of education and household income. Since Macs are inherently more expensive, it would follow that the average income of a Mac owner should be higher than the average income of a Windows owner, and along those lines, the average education of a Mac owner should be higher than that of a Windows user. That bears out in large surveys. About 70% of Mac users have a college education whereas only 54% of Windows users have a college education according to a 2002 Nielsen study. Ultimately, it’s not the “average” that matters--it’s the least tech savvy in any group that ruins it for the rest of us.  Take spam for example.  Recent work from UC Berkeley and UCSD determined that out of 350 million pharmaceutical spam messages sent via the Storm botnet, 10,522 users visited the site and 28 people tried to actually make a purchase. It’s those users that make spam profitable and make it a problem for the rest of us. At another level, there is some truth to this claim because Mac owners have to be consciously making a switch to the Mac. Either they’re technically savvy users who are comfortable dealing with cross-platform issues or they're technical neophytes who are still smart enough to know that they don’t know anything and therefore choose the Mac as their one method of trying to stay safe. It’s the Windows users who don’t know even know that they’re vulnerable who drive the statistics up. This myth is true if you consider the statistics; the myth is unimportant. Myth #2: Mac OS X have a superior design In theory, Vista should be the better-designed operating system. Microsoft actively invests in extensive security capabilities and the Address Space Layout Randomization in Windows Vista and recent security analyses comparing number of risks and “days at risk” show that Windows Vista users actually fare better than Mac OS X users. The problem is that these analyses are limited to “security holes we know about” and get patched. Suppose two operating systems have 1000 holes in them. If one manufacturer patches 400 of them, and the other only patches 40, which is the more secure system? The answer is neither. It only takes one hole to compromise the entire system. Myth #3: Macs are targeted less frequently. Malware is profit-driven. Since there are fewer Macs on the market, the hypothesis is that commercial malware operators will not target the Mac until they reach a critical threshold market share. At some point, Macs will reach critical mass and it will be as big of a target at Windows. An analysis performed by the Director of Emerging Technologies at Cloudmark and published in the IEEE Security and Privacy has an interesting hypothesis. Using game theory, he predicts that Macs will become an economically-feasible target once the platform breaks 16% market share. Even with the success of the Mac, we don’t see Apple reaching that level for a few years (if that). Then, once the Mac reaches that level of market share, the assumption has to be that developing malware for that Mac costs the same as developing malware for the PC, and this may not be the case. In 2008, there were 1.5 million different pieces of malware targeting Windows machines. There are less than 200 pieces of malware targeting the Mac. Myth #4: Pwn2Own This one comes from the comments section of our State of the Personal Computer piece from late last year. The story about the Pwn2Own contest is that a hacking contest was held to see if Windows Vista, Ubuntu, or Mac OS X was more secure. Hack the machine, and you win the computer. The MacBook Air fell 2 minutes after the start of the contest. Windows Vista fell the next day. Ubuntu remained unhacked for the entire 3 day competition. Therefore, Macs are the least secure, followed by Windows Vista, followed by Ubuntu Linux. That’s how the story goes. The details are where things get interesting. It’s easy to imagine Pwn2Own as this free-for-all death match with hundreds of hackers going at it for glory and fame. In fact, Pwn2Own was a contest with very rigid rules. You had to wait in line to attack a target. Only one team had an opportunity to hack a machine at any time. Each opportunity was 30 minutes, and if you are unsuccessful, you have to go back to the end of the line and wait your turn. You can only wait in one line at a time, and you can only win the contest once. First come, first serve. Only four teams participated. Day 1: Win the notebook if you can do a true remote execution attack. No attempt was made. Day 2: Web browsers and mail application will now be allowed. The organizers of the competition will visit a Web site or receive an email. The winner of the MacBook Air knew that he had a previously undescribed flaw in Safari that would win the competition. He was the first in line that day. Hacked in 2 minutes. The two minute story makes for a great story and lots of publicity for both the conference and the security researcher, but no one really talks about the time spent BEFORE the contest to discover the exploit. Day 3: Common plug-ins are now installed. The Vista notebook is hacked via an Adobe Flash exploit. The two-man team that took down Vista did so with their personal MacBook Pro notebooks. Although the Vista notebook wasn’t the first to go that morning, the Flash exploit that affected Windows Vista also affected the Ubuntu Linux machine that had Adobe Flash installed. The contestants just weren’t interested in trying to win the Ubuntu machine. No one signed up to try to hack the Ubuntu Linux notebook according to the organizers. So, when you read an article talking about Pwn2own, the fact still remains that OS X has not been the target of active remote execution exploits or browser holes in real-life. Current OS X malware exists only in the form of Trojans in which the user is willingly installing software and willingly entering the administrator password.

• We Get Things Fast Again

  If it wasn’t the fake SMBIOS that was causing the problem, our next thought was to look at the AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext hack. This kernel extension is disabled on all Hackintosh installations including so-called “vanilla installations” by either by removing the file itself, or adding another file to disable this feature. Once we re-enabled the kext, things returned to normal speeds. Deleting the file completely resulted in slower speeds once again. AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext enabledNormal speedAppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext deleted18% slowerAppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext installed but disabled via secondary kernel extension18% slower With such a performance hit when running a hacked Macintosh, the Apple Tax takes on new meaning. Other notebooks may have similar performance penalties due to power management idiosyncrasies--the difference was never noticed because no one tried creating a “Hacked Mac on a Mac.” When Wired Magazine tried running Mac OS X on their MSI Wind, they noted that OS X ran faster on the netbook than Windows XP did. Earlier, we mentioned that the MacBook was extremely responsive. If the MSI Wind was experiencing the same performance deficits that we saw when running “Hacked Mac on a Mac” when the AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement kernel extension is disabled, then an official Apple Netbook would be well worth the Apple Tax…

• Final Thoughts

  Two months ago, I never thought I would become a Mac fan. I had toyed with the idea, but if my Vista PC wasn’t compromised, I’m sure I’d still be a PC guy. But my time with the MacBook changed things. When it comes to my core computing applications: Internet, office productivity, and digital imaging and content creation, the MacBook works beautifully. It’s incredibly stable, extremely responsive, and a pure joy to use. Small touches like Cover Flow for the normal Finder and integrated Canon RAW support bring the extra level of polish that’s lacking from Windows Vista. With the unibody MacBooks adding a final tactile complement to software, it’s hard for me to imagine ever going back to Windows after making the switch on my primary PC. The MacBook itself is a stunning piece of hardware. Starting with the aluminum exterior and wonderfully intuitive multitouch trackpad to digging internally to the Nvidia GeForce 9400M chipset and careful motherboard design, the MacBook is one of the best notebooks I have used at any price.  Sure, as a techie I’d love to have a higher-quality screen from the MacBook Air, and the backlit keyboard of the 2.4 GHz model, and yes, the addition of FireWire or at the very least an eSATA port would have been welcome. But, the notebook does everything else so well, so efficiently that I still get a smile every time I use my MacBook. I’m not the first PC guy to be impressed by the latest Macs. Our colleagues at Anandtech were pleasantly surprised to see the superior battery life of Mac OS X over Vista and our colleagues at Wired aren’t the only ones to comment on the speed of Mac OS X over even Windows XP. We’re just the first to look into the possibility of performance penalties in running hacked Mac operating systems. Windows Vista is still my platform of choice for home theater PCs and gaming. Windows Media Center still offers a better living room interface than Apple Front Row, and its support for ATSC HDTV makes it must-have in a digital living room. More importantly, I can build Windows Media Center PC of my choice, combining a silent CPU and power supply with a ton of hard drives and multiple ATSC tuners. The Mac doesn’t have anything like Media Center. Plex, the Mac OS X fork of XBMC and Boxee both show a lot of promise, but without the ATSC integration that Windows Media Center offers, it’ll be a while before I even think about leaving Windows Vista behind. The Mac also can’t compete with the PC when it comes to games. While StarCraft 2 will likely be the Mac Game of the Year in 2009, the PC version of Mirror’s Edge already has me itching to rebuild a gaming PC. But I’m waiting to rebuild. In January, Apple is expected to launch a new set of desktops. If these systems offer Core i7 quad-core CPUs, a modern GPU, and arrive at a reasonable price, I’ll be the first to get one to dual boot Vista for games and OS X for everything else. If Apple comes through with a netbook, I’m not sure if I’ll pick one up or not. The MacBook already does what I need in a notebook and the iPhone does everything else I need for extreme portability. An Apple netbook would need eight-hour battery life and full Office 2008 document support for me to make the switch.  Who knows, maybe iWork ’09 will run on ARM?