I’ve spent a lot of time in this space chronicling Window’s vulnerability to virus, worm and security attacks. This week Microsoft, joined by law enforcement officials from the Secret Service, the FBI, and Interpol, announced that they will provide $5 million to fund a program to track down writers of worms, viruses and other malicious code. The first two bounties, $250,000 apiece, will be for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators of the MSBlast worm and SoBig virus, which wreaked havoc on the internet this summer. Cash rewards for information have been successful in solving bank robberies and other crimes. I hope they catch ‘em.

Someone asked me the other day, “Why aren’t there any viruses on the Mac?”

The quick and easy answer (and the most popular with the supposedly “informed” computer media) is that Macs are such a small blip on the computer radar screen that hackers don’t get enough “bang for the buck” in attacking Macs. Whatever it is in their egos that makes them do what they do is not satisfied by disrupting just 5% of the computers out there. The implied corollary to this theory is that hackers could easily attack the Mac, they just choose not to.

Why do hackers attack Windows? Because they can, and it doesn’t appear to be too difficult a task. Of course, they do have millions of Windows users who don’t download and apply Security Updates helping them out.

So, is a Mac (specifically, a Mac running OS X) really less vulnerable to attack than Windows? The answer is – yes. Mac OS X’s underpinnings are a variant of UNIX called FreeBSD. UNIX has been around a long time, and many of the “holes” that plague Windows have been patched up tight in UNIX over the years. Without getting into all the gory details, a Mac with OS X plugs the holes from the get-go, while Windows XP does not. Mac OS X and UNIX restrict access to the entry points of the system to a “Root” user, which, by default, is not active. In Windows XP, the first user of the computer becomes by default the Administrator, and if the user doesn’t know any better, the entry points to the computer are immediately available. It’s not that the protection isn’t there, it’s just not always on by default.

© 2003 Peter F. Zimowski