Flashback Malware Puts Apple in Security Spotlight: Experts Weigh In

Apr 13, 2012 08:00 pm | PC World
Increased market share coupled with Apple's lack of transparency are largely to blame for an uptick in Mac security problems, say experts.
by Howard Baldwin

It was a busy week for Apple malware hunters fighting the Flashback Trojan horse, which has infected between 270,000 and 600,000 Macs. A bevy of tools to find and remove the malware debuted this week. And two days after promising to release a detection and removal tool, Apple finally offered its own fix.

Now, as the dust settles on what is considered to be the largest Mac malware threat to date, experts have started pointing fingers at Apple as being partially to blame for the scope of the Flashback malware infection. They argue that if Apple were more transparent about security issues--and if it had promptly released a Flashback fix--the extent of the damage could have been smaller. Also contributing to the magnitude of the infections is a boost in the number of Mac OS users, they say.

"When the installed base [of an OS] is 10 percent or less, the bad guys don't care," says Peter James, spokesperson for Mac antivirus and security product vendor Intego. The bigger the user base, the more attractive the target, he says. Web analytics firm NetMarketShare.com estimates that the Mac installed base has jumped to 13 percent in the United States, and research firm Gartner says that Apple has become the fastest-growing U.S. computer maker--overtaking Acer and Toshiba--over the past year.

Apple's Image of Invulnerability--Gone

Perhaps surprisingly, James and other security experts say that Apple needs to look to Microsoft when it comes to handling OS security breaches. For years Apple has mocked Microsoft for its track record in dealing with Windows malware, viruses, and weekly patches. Now the tables have turned, says Larry Ponemon of the Ponemon Institute.

Ponemon and others say the Flashback Trojan horse is the final nail in the coffin for Apple's stellar security image. He says that although Microsoft juggles a much larger number of threats, it does a better job of warning customers and delivering fixes.

We have heard dire "Macpocalypse" warnings before. Last year Apple's sterling security image was tarnished with the advent of the Mac Defender malware program. Before that, in 2006, the focus was on the Leap.A virus, the first ever virus for Mac OS X. (For a great short history of Apple Mac malware, check out NakedSecurity.com's timeline from 1982 to 2010.) But this time, security experts insist, Apple's security bragging rights are gone for good.

NB : here i was, thinking the mac is impenetratable

Dell names former Cisco Executive to lead networking , Sep 23, 2010 02:36 pm

Dario Zamarian will be Dell's first VP for networking, possibly signaling an increased focus on the area
by Stephen Lawson

Dell has hired Cisco Systems veteran Dario Zamarian to lead its networking business, naming him as its first vice president dedicated to that division.

Zamarian has joined Dell as vice president and general manager of the networking division, the company announced on Thursday. Zamarian worked at Cisco for six years, most recently as vice president of systems and network management.

Networking has been a fairly small part of Dell's business so far, but the company has become more active in this area as it gears up to compete with the likes of Hewlett-Packard and Cisco in supplying all parts of a data center. The appointment of a vice president to lead networking may signal an accelerated push into this arena. In slightly more than a year, Dell has signed deals to resell network equipment from Juniper Networks, Brocade Communications and wireless LAN vendor Aruba Networks. The company also has a line of homegrown LAN equipment, which carries the PowerConnect brand.

Darren Thomas, who had been leading both the storage and networking businesses at Dell, will continue to run the storage division.

Dell's strength has traditionally been in PCs and servers, but the company has been trying to build up its portfolio in storage and networking, the other two big pieces in the data center puzzle. It failed in a bid to buy high-end storage vendor 3Par earlier this year after HP won a dramatic bidding war with a US$2.4 billion final offer. At least one analyst has speculated that Dell might try to acquire Brocade, a storage networking player that itself got into Ethernet LANs in 2008 by acquiring Foundry Networks.

Networking traditionally has been a commodity business at Dell, but virtualization and cloud computing have made the network a critical piece of a converged data center architecture, said Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Jon Oltsik.

"Now they have to have some network expertise and network management expertise just to build the kinds of bigger data centers that they're going after," Oltsik said. The appointment of Zamarian signals that Dell is acting to make this a reality, he said.

The Dell announcement marked the second time this week that a midlevel executive from Cisco, the dominant enterprise networking vendor, has left to join a rival company in a high-level role. On Monday, Polycom announced that Joseph Burton, former chief technology officer for unified communications at Cisco, had joined Polycom as chief strategy and technology officer.

NOTE : why will these guys leave cisco for any other company for that matter?