My name is David Pierce, and I’m a student at the University of Virginia. I’m something of a web nerd- particularly when it comes to blogs and technology. I read them, I comment- it’s a little sad. What I want to do with this blog, though, is make it something for everyone. I like sports, technology, politics, all kinds of things. I might be self-indulgent in doing this, but I want to see who else out there shares my interests. I’ll be posting things I come across that I think are worth noting, and my hope is to over time develop enough of a community here that we can foster real discussion. Some of it will be “which new cell phone is the coolest?” and some will be more serious. I’m new to this, so bear with me, and hopefully we’ll have some fun!
Here’s my first topic of the day: I came across this on the New York Times website today. It seems that in a contest between a number of different computers, a Mac was the first to get hacked, in 2 minutes. For all the flak given to Windows, at least they held out longer. I wonder if, as Macs gain more market share, they’ll end up in the same boat as Windows. Does Windows get exploited more just because more people use Windows?
I think more Windows systems are exploited because they are fairly homogeneous — despite all the noise about the seven versions of Vista — both in the system internals (for backwards compatibility) and in the apps (e.g., Vista getting cracked by way of Java). The Mac got cracked *first* because Apple is focused on closing their doors to users, not so much crackers, and this means their internal security approach is weak, despite OS X’s reliance on BSD for its core — I think that gives them a sort of free pass, and they forget that their new software is not nearly as security-hardened. Linux got left alone because it really is a lot of work to exploit a completely open system, even if you do know that it’s possible — because Linux is really, really heterogeneous.
It’s not that the systems are particularly better or worse, or that market share determines who gets cracked — all the systems were exploited by a social engineering of either the end user or the developers’ mindset. If you want a more secure machine, it will be almost entirely up to the human element to secure it, because the tools are available for everyone.