Get ready to hear some Apple fanboy rage. CEO and founder of security vendor Kaspersky Labs, Eugene Kaspersky, has said that Apple’s security for its Mac OS X operating system is ten years behind Microsoft’s Windows.
“I think they [Apple] are ten years behind Microsoft in terms of security,” Kaspersky said in an interview with CBR. “For many years I’ve been saying that from a security point of view there is no big difference between Mac and Windows. It’s always been possible to develop Mac malware, but this one was a bit different.”
The comments come after the well-known Flashback malware outbreak, which had infected 650,000 computers at its peak. Apple was pointed out by many as, despite being a Java (owned by Oracle) exploit, it has full control of how Java is patched. It also is notorious in delaying key patches by months. When it was already released for Mac, Windows and Linux users were already patched.
He notes that Apple is entering what Microsoft previously had to go through ten years ago, when malware and virus infection became a major problem – especially with Windows XP. Now, Microsoft’s security has pretty much improved.
“They will understand very soon that they have the same problems Microsoft had ten or 12 years ago. They will have to make changes in terms of the cycle of updates and so on and will be forced to invest more into their security audits for the software,” Kaspersky said.
Kaspersky also added that he expects to see more malware targeting Mac OS X as cyber-criminals “learn from success and this [Flashback] was the first successful one”.
It looks like the idea that Macs are more safer than PCs has been utterly destroyed by the Flashback malware and the ensuing debacle on how to patch the system. Especially as since more and more malware writers are now targeting the PC, to some success.