What is apple snow leopard mac#
What is apple snow leopard windows#

The kinds of attacks you can get through a website or an e-mail are not platform specific.' 'There's going to be exploits where they try to steal people's passwords, identities or credit card numbers. 'It's a different kind of criminal activity,' Kahney said in a phone interview.

Phishing, for example, is a security threat that involves tricking the user into handing over personal information.

What is apple snow leopard mac#

When discussing security, another issue to consider is that the landscape of internet threats has evolved over the years to be less platform-centric, said Leander Kahney, owner of the Cult of Mac blog and former news editor of. 'As their market share continues to grow, they're only going to become a bigger and bigger target.' 'Their good track record is more a matter of luck in small market share,' Viega added. However, the anti-virus function in Snow Leopard only blacklists the most common pieces of malware, so it's not a complete anti-virus system, Viega said.Īlso, Apple has only just started implementing the Address Space Layout Randomization anti-exploitation technique by moving to 64-bit addressing in Snow Leopard, Miller said.

What is apple snow leopard windows#

Apple also added hardware-enforced Data Execution Prevention, which defends against buffer-overflow attacks - a major security feature that Windows has had for years, Miller said. In Snow Leopard, Apple has added security enhancements including Executive Disable, which prevents memory-corruption attacks, and some virus detection. He noted that because so few Mac users are running anti-virus software, there's far less need for malicious coders to create hundreds of different variants of the same attack, as they do for Windows. Those hundreds of pieces of malware are small compared to the 1.8 million total pieces of malware discovered last year, but it would be unfair to compare these numbers directly, Viega said.

Two years ago there were zero pieces of malware targeting the Mac platform, and in the past year, there were a few hundred, according to John Viega, a security researcher and author of the book The Myths of Security. As Apple slowly expands its market share, it is gradually becoming a bigger target for attack. Mac owners' smugness may not last forever.