Kaspersky doubles up slam at Apple

May 14, 2012, 9:11 PM — A week or so ago the founder and CEO of Kaspersky Labs said Apple is 10 years behind Microsoft in security. By that Eugene Kaspersky meant Apple needs to be as skittish and responsive as Microsoft was a decade ago, afterwards being hammered for the previous decade over the many vulnerabilities in Windows and the very little Microsoft did to fix any of them.

The company's CTO is weighing in

Now the company's CTO is weighing in, with more criticism, this time of Mac OS X exactly, not just Apple in general.

"Mac OS is actually vulnerable," Kaspersky CTO Nikolay Grebennikov said in press interviews. "Our first investigations show Apple doesn't pay enough attention to security."

That analysis concluded, as Grebennikov's boss Eugene Kaspersky said, that Apple is not ready to respond quickly enough spontaneously to counter security threats. Worse, it hinders other companies from doing so as then.

"Apple blocked Oracle from updating Java on Mac OS, and they perform all the udpates themselves. They only released the patch a few weeks ago – two or three months afterwards the Oracle patch. That's far too long," Grebennikov said.

The Java update became an issue afterwards it

The Java update became an issue afterwards it was discovered the Flashback Trojan, which had infected enough Macs to build a botnet of more than 600,000 machines, used flaws in Apple's Java implementation to take over the machine.

Apple is all in all struggling to get the botnet in accordance with control, during another Trojan aimed at Macs, SabPab, continues to expand its own settlement in the once-utopian fields of Macintosh.

The wild that has been written exactly to target iOS

No malware has been discovered in the wild that has been written exactly to target iOS, which runs iPads and iPhones. If malware producers are true to their usual response times, but, the first bits of bespoke iOS malware will begin threatening Apple phones and tablets as so then as Mac OS X machines, Grebennikov said.Two top execs, two public slams of Apple. Why?

Aside from the oddity of having the CEO and CTO of a major security company openly and harshly criticize a systems vendor by name in different venues at different times, Kaspersky's tandem slam contributed one additional bit of confusion: When he was originally quoted in IT publications, Grebennikov seemed to have said Kaspersky was analyzing MacOS vulnerabilities at Apple's request and in accordance with contract to Apple.

Kaspersky has since retracted that, saying Grebennikov's statement was misconstrued to mean Apple hired Kaspersky to help improve its security.

Even if a big Apple security scandal is an irresistible possibility to gain a little visibility at Apple's expanse, having two top executives from the same company slam Apple openly, in harsh terms, for poor security is overkill.

The one-two from Kaspersky

Given the one-two from Kaspersky and Grebennikov, it's not surprising some in the press were confused about why Kaspersky was being quite this energetically vocal about Apple's malware problem.

Kaspersky execs may see gold in the lax attitude most Mac users seem to take to security, an attitude for which Apple has to take much of the blame, afterwards reassuring clients for years that the Mac was far less vulnerable than Windows machines.

Apple didn't mention the ego-deflating reality that Macs were less vulnerable because there were so few of them malware writers didn't bother with Macs.

Now that iPhones and iPads rule the cool-computing universe and even Mac OS X machines are gaining market share, malware writers are interested, Mac users are unprepared, and Kaspersky execs are ready to slam Apple openly as often and as hard as necessary to let Mac users know there's a security company out there willing to deal not only with their insecurities, however their irritating smugness as so then.

sandeepseeram answers Is my phone hacked? I have a undeletable message in my inbox. It has no details of a sender and the message is blank. Is this a hack?

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