AppleCare Reps Told To Skirt Malware Questions 389
Dominare writes with this bit from ZDnet: "'A confidential internal Apple document tells the company's front-line support people how to handle customers who call about malware infections: Don't confirm or deny that an infection exists, and whatever you do, don't try to remove it.' So basically, now that Macs have their own equivalent to XP Antivirus the best you can hope for is to be pointed at the store where you can buy something that may or may not fix your problem ... nice."
Fool proof way to hack nearly any system. (Score:5, Interesting)
hey, this is a web page claiming that your infected, click ok!!
umm, you clicked cancel, you really want to click ok, ok??
you know, it doesn't matter which button you push, both result
in the continuation of this racter like discussion.
wow, you clicked ok, wait while I install some software to 'help' you.
oh, while installing I noticed that I will need your password to continue....
wow, you gave me your password, can you google pwn3d ?
works on PC, works on Mac, likely works on every other modern OS.
this isn't an exploit via bug, its an exploit via user, if you drop your pants in front of a glory hole......
that said Apple isn't really helping by avoiding the topic.
Yes but Dell does (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is Apple is NOT an OS maker, they are a system maker. In particular they make a unified system where they do it all. If you talk to a Mac head this is one of the things they talk about being so great, that Apple creates a "unified experience" and supports everything. They push the model of "Just bring it to the Mac store," as how you handle support and all that.
Fine but that means that you are going to get questions about malware and the like. They can't play it off with "But MS doesn't help!" They are selling the "We are the company that takes care of you and makes everything," they get to deal with the support calls.
Also, MS DOES in fact help with that shit. If nothing else they publish the malicious software removal tool (which Windows get automatically) and make Microsoft Security Essentials available for free. While they don't do everything, they do provide free tools to help.
Re:Ed Bott "unbiased" article. (Score:3, Interesting)
not sure what the /. issue with the guy is
ed bott makes a living writing privately (for news sites and publishing his own books) on technology topics, mostly about windows - he likes windows, he writes about it, and publishes his work. getting paid to do what you like in a field that you like doesn't make you a shill. it makes you happy. it's a pretty cynical worldview, to assume that people aren't doing honest things because they like them, but instead dishonest things because a MegaCorp is paying them BIG BUX
on TFA, i don't see what "bias" you want to find in facts - the document exists. apple documents have an anti-apple bias, is what you are trying to say? facts have an anti-apple bias? of course not, that's silly.
Re:It will be swept under the xprotect rug... (Score:4, Interesting)
No, what I'm saying is there are currently NO viruses in the wild for Mac. How you came away with "Mac is invulnerable" from my statement above is a bit odd. Since I never mentioned any other malware but this one trojan. As far as real viruses, contrast that with 100,000+ viruses for Windows OS and you begin to see a bit of a difference between the two OS's. Saying that a trojan is a virus is nonsense. A virus attacks via vulnerabilities in the OS which should be addressed and closed. A trojan can only attack via the user (socially engineered). Any OS can be infected by a trojan if they are able to dupe the user into giving up the admin password. No OS is secure from user exploits.
Re:OSX (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup. And Linux's dominant market share in the server space means that it's an even juicier target. Which is why you hear about so many pwnt Linux boxes on the web.
http://www.zone-h.org/news/id/4737 [zone-h.org]
Last year the Zone-H archived a sad record number, we archived 1.419.203 websites defacements. Why and how this is happening? [...] Since many years ago, Linux became the most used OS for webservers and of course the preferred target for the defacers. Last year we archived 1.126.987 attacks against websites running on the Linux systems. The most used exploit by the defacers is the CVE-2010–3301, that was fixed in 2007 and was mysteriously reintroduced in 2008, in a large pile of kernel versions x86_64.
You are obviously right - 80% of website defacements last year all dues to rooted Linux servers - and you don't hear about it, so it must not have happened.