Comments on: 10.6.3 is Imminent…Maybe the Malware’s Not Far Behind?

By: OS X 10.6.3 Update Brings Record Number of Fixes « Apple News Daily

OS X 10.6.3 Update Brings Record Number of Fixes « Apple News Daily — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 10:36:09 +0000

[...] predicted, an update to Apple’s Snow Leopard and Leopard operating systems, which fixes a record number of [...]

By: Knightlie

Knightlie — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:05:59 +0000

I think Miller has shares in Mac security software vendors, and with the money he keeps winning prostituting himself to this nonsensical security competition, he's probably just bought a lot more.

No sleep to be lost here, methinks.

By: bin

bin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 05:13:43 +0000

try this. it’s works great. It’s the ccleaner of mac software.
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/onyx.html

By: anonymous

anonymous — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 05:10:51 +0000

So what i’m getting from this discussion is that i could post a link and all you mac users would click on it and not get a virus right?

if this is so, we could have a fun exercise.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:57:12 +0000

just so you know the *PRERELEASE* part is for people behind Apple’s internal network. Even in retail stores you see this…like a day before it comes out. Not gonna say how I know…but it is.

By: Liam Cassidy

Liam Cassidy — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:49:35 +0000

Thanks for your comment William, cogent point well-made. I completely agree, I suspect the Mac community is complacent when it comes to security. And that’s understandable, there have never been any real exploits!

But there *will* be. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. Sounds clichéd, I know, but it’s true.

The dark side of expanding market share is that malware writers will, gradually, turn their attention to the Mac as virgin ground ripe for the taking.

The almost rabid faith some Mac users place in OS X’s capacity to protect them from all evil-doers is – eventually – going to bite ‘em on their bottoms.

Many Mac users don’t want to accept that, one day, OS X will be targeted just as Windows is today. I don’t miss running security software, and I will lament one day needing to use it again. But it’s never too early to start talking about the issue honestly.

And that means not immediately jumping to the defense of the great and flawless Mac OS and its UNIX underpinnings!

By: chrish

chrish — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 15:06:14 +0000

I had Growl go nuts for a while, pegging one of my cores at 100% constantly and not displaying any notifications.

I uh, actually only noticed because my MBP was running hot and battery life was awful.

Restarted Growl and everything was back to awesome.

Snow Leopard’s been fine on my unibody MBP and my wife’s black MacBook.

By: Lars

Lars — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:17:54 +0000

Check your Activity Monitor to see what is using the CPU so much. My bet is it’s font-related. Snow Leopard seems to be much less tolerant of old fonts.

By: Udo

Udo — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 08:43:13 +0000

I don’t know how about you, guys. But my MacBook Pro Snow Leopard of late 2008 has become so sluggish lately, that I can hardly bear it. I’ve migrated to Snow Leopard sometime in October. Since then every day it just gets worse. Switching users, opening windows of Safari is terrible — I see a beachball lots of times for extensive periods of time. I haven’t installed anything in Snow Leopard. From my long exprience in Windows, if that was Windows, I could only suspect that my Mac is already a part of a zombie network. I still believe the community, and hope that this is not the case. What else can there be? Disk is clean. I’m anticipating for every software update to fix this, but to my disappointment they don’t. Hopefully 10.6.3 with its “Performance improvements ” will do something… If not, then I’ll be upgrading memory from 2 to 4, because I see lots of page outs. But there were no lots of page outs back in November! I’ve changed nothing since then…

By: William

William — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 07:36:16 +0000

Some folks in the comments are acting like these flaws don’t exist. Theoretical holes lead to exploited holes. It’s no reason to panic, but it also means Mac users should take the potential threats seriously. The viruses in System 6 & 7 weren’t malicious, but if you still think modern Windows malware is authored by similar out of control college pranksters, you’re out of touch. These guys make real money from their bots, worms, and trojans. And now that more software programmers taking Apple’s platforms seriously, there will be more malware programmers coming along as well.

There’s no reason to panic today, because there are no exploits out there. But the Mac community should be demanding good security practices and riding Apple to improve security rather than taking shortcuts for “ease of use”. How so? Safari’s “Open Safe Files after Downloading” should not be turned on by default if the option must even exist at all. And when doing software updates, Apple should have to fully play by the same authorization rules other software makers must abide (some report this wasn’t the case with the recent Safari upgrade). Finally, we should be asking for high security features like finishing the implementation of Address Space Layout Randomization that was only partially implemented for Leopard and still not fully finished in Snow Leopard.

The Mac is good with security today, but the community shouldn’t get complacent.