Компьютеры Mac безопасней обычных ПК?

Еще недавно считалось, что компьютеры Mac значительно безопасней персональных компьютеров под управлением Windows и что пользователи Mac намного реже подвергаются воздействию вредоносных программ и кибератакам. Однако события последних лет заставили многих пользователей задаться вопросом, действительно ли компьютеры Mac так безопасны.

Как сравнить безопасность платформ Mac и Microsoft?

До определенной степени имеющийся уровень безопасности зависит от версии используемой операционной системы Mac OS X или Windows. Для объективности лучше всего сравнивать самые последние версии (со всеми исправлениями) операционных систем.

В настоящее время действительно существует меньше вредоносных программ для Mac OS X, чем для Windows. Однако это не означает, что компьютеры Mac полностью безопасны. По приблизительной оценке 700 000 компьютеров пользователей Mac OS X были заражены троянцем Flashback. Пользователи, которые были уверены, что им не нужно антивирусное ПО (потому что у них компьютеры Mac), обнаружили, что из-за ложного чувства безопасности они оказались совершенно незащищенными перед этой атакой.

Как быстро производители стараются помочь своим пользователям?

Оценка уровня безопасности — а также степени ущерба и возможных неудобств в результате заражения — это вопрос не только количества вредоносных объектов, нацеленных на ту или иную платформу. Скорость, с которой производители реагируют на проблемы, также может иметь решающее значение для работы компьютеров.

Для выпуска патча для уязвимостей, использованных вирусом Flashback, компании Apple понадобилось почти 50 дней, и обновление было доступно только для операционных систем OS X Snow Leopard и OS X Lion. Это заставило некоторых людей заговорить о том, что использование уязвимости вредоносной программой и последующая значительная задержка в получении обновления могут оказать крайне негативное влияние на безопасность компьютера.

Как и ПК, компьютерам Mac требуется программное обеспечение для обеспечения безопасности в интернете.

Таким образом, несмотря на то, что вредоносных программ для атак Mac OS X меньше, многие пользователи Mac теперь сходятся во мнении, что им следует быть более подготовленными, чем раньше. Пользователи Mac теперь предпринимают шаги по укреплению защиты своих компьютеров и устанавливают антивирусы для борьбы с вредоносными программами, как это делали пользователи ПК многие годы.

Другие статьи и ссылки, связанные с компьютерной безопасностью

Компьютеры Mac безопасней обычных ПК?

Еще недавно считалось, что компьютеры Mac значительно безопасней персональных компьютеров под управлением Windows. Однако события последних лет заставили многих пользователей задаться вопросом, действительно ли компьютеры Mac так безопасны.

What’s More Secure: Windows or Mac?

The burning question regarding what operating system is more vulnerable to cyberattacks has been asked for years and yet there is no clear-cut answer to whether it’s Windows or Mac. Although there is a general belief that Mac systems are far more impervious to Malware than Windows. However, you might be surprised that Mac aren’t as secure as most users believe.

While both operating systems are vulnerable to attacks, over the years Microsoft has learnt more painful lessons about security as compared to Mac. However, courtesy the stumbles in the past, today Windows 10 is technically more secure than the latest version of Mac OS.

Yet Windows 10 is still the preferred target of hackers. Reason being Windows having a larger client base than Mac. However, with time the attacker’s attention is shifting towards making Mac susceptible to attacks.

Web Based Attacks:

Mac and Windows both are vulnerable to phishing attacks. PC users alone are not a prey to such attacks Mac users too, fall for the lures and tend to get their data infected.

When you are surfing the web out of nowhere you receive a popup warning message saying your computer has a virus and it is blocked. To fix the problem you need to call a number. What will you do? Surely you will be scared and in most cases, will end up calling the number. Attacks like this can take place on any machine either Mac or Windows.

Such messages are called pop up ads which are misleading and are not operating system dependent. They are made to fool a user and earn money. These pop up ads look real but remember it’s just a picture which is telling something is wrong with your computer. But in reality nothing is wrong.

Attacks Aren’t Machine Specific

Anyone can have a well secure machine regardless of the operating system. It depends on the user how much he is and what all measure he prefers to keep the machine secure.

Mac OS and Windows both encourage users to download program this can be dangerous, as user don’t know what he is heading too. Both operating system runs several security services and one who is cautious knows how to use them.

Windows provide User Access Control for users to check the program before allowing it to run. But users click on Yes without reading the text. We cannot blame Operating system it’s the user which makes the machine vulnerable.

Need For More Mature Users Than Operating Systems

From security point of view both Windows and Mac are good and efficient. But being secure alone doesn’t help it’s the user and usage what matters. A Mac user can end up downloading a malicious plug in like a PC User. It doesn’t matter if there is an extra layer of security provided to Mac users in name of entering a username and password for download. They will key in the credentials and will download the malicious plugin which will harm their Mac like it will do for PC. It is a unifying threat which puts both operating systems at risk and that’s how threats exploit.

Market Share Creates A Difference

Market share makes a difference when it comes to security of both the operating systems. Mac wins the race even with the lowest market share because the one with larger market share here is at risk. Even though Windows is more secure yet it is at risk. If one fine day the market share flips there will be more Mac exploits as compared to Windows.

Not only this browser security also matters as it also has a considerable share in security. We cannot blame Internet Explorer even Mac’s default web browser Safari is not secured it has a lousy reputation. Even a child with little technical knowledge can use it to attack Mac. It’s just matter of time, soon when the arrow targeting Windows will be shot at Mac you will realize the fact.

Security Updates

Microsoft and Apple both are taking security measure to reduce the risk of cyberattacks. They resolve security related flaws at the earliest to avoid threats. Microsoft releases more security updates to keep users secure as compared to Mac. Yet, security bugs are discovered in latest version of Mac OS.

Therefore, both operating system should release timely updates, irrespective of the fact which is more vulnerable.

Wrap Up

By far what do you think which is more secure Windows or Mac? It is hard to name anyone as both have their pros and cons. There is no specific reason to choose anyone on security grounds. All operating systems are susceptible to attacks, the only way to reduce the risk is by adopting security measures.

An updated anti-virus or up to date operating system alone doesn’t help. One needs to keep firmware and Java updated. Also use a standard account rather than an admin account. There is not much difference between them if any application needs admin rights it will ask you to enter the credentials. Then it will with the user to provide or not thus having an upper hand.

Is Mac OSX really more secure than Windows [closed]

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Closed 3 years ago .

For as long as i’ve been a computer geek there have always been Apple fanboys and girls stating that «Oh Macs are just more secure than Windows» yet they can never provide evidence for it and when they do what they are actually saying is that virus’s aren’t being made for Mac as often as Windows which doesn’t automatically mean that OSX is a more secure system

Which got me thinking; is Mac OSX actually more secure than Windows? or is it a simple case of hackers want to cause as much damage as possible and therefore go after Windows as that’s more widely dispensed in the globe

2 Answers 2

Short answer: No

Windows traditionally has the largest market share for educational, governmental, business and home users, it also has the largest attack surface for out of date & pirated installations (Pirated installs can not be updated from windows update servers, think Eternalblue exploit, WannaCry exploitation, PetYa, NotPetya etc . ) which is why Viruses are more prevalent there as this makes sense especially for Ransomware where the attacker wants the largest return on investment for their time.

OSX is not immune to these issues however and suffers from Thunderbolt2 («dongle» infecting malware), DMA recovery of the FileVault2 keys etc as well as Malware which is actually tailored to OSX (OSX.Dok, OSX.Filecoder for example) also issues where the code signing certificates were stolen allowing malware authors to sign applications to appear as though they were official Apple applications.

So case and point with either OS is, if you click on a drive by download attack email link which has been crafted to support Windows or OSX then you are going to get compromised.

Your OS is only going to protect you so far as you practice «Safe Sec» (pun intended), read, understand and enact STIG (Security Technical Implementation Guides) for your chose OS, Ensure you are running AV, Firewall, Limit Administrative access to the system etc .

For further reading I highly recommend this OSX Hardening guide https://github.com/drduh/macOS-Security-and-Privacy-Guide which covers a slew of issues with OSX out of the box and how to protect against them, for Windows you have sources such as https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2015/07/24/security-in-windows-10/ I do not have up to date experience in deploying & hardening a windows environment however.

More secure isn’t an exact measure. The level of security depends on the threats you are trying to counter. If you surround yourself with an army of armed guards, you are pretty secure against some random stranger getting to you, but you open yourself up to being attacked by your guards for not paying them enough and working them too hard. This may seem like a silly example, but we see it regularly with military dictatorships that are overthrown by coups.

Computers are no different. Neither Windows, Mac, or even Unix is free of bugs. They all have issues that can be exploited to bypass their security model and do bad things. There are only a couple of mathematically proven bug free operating systems in existence and they are very limited and used on embedded controllers. Even those proven OSs aren’t immune to the impacts of physical tampering that move them outside of their design constraints.

Windows is certainly more frequently exploited than Mac, but does that mean Mac is necessarily harder to compromise? Not really, Windows represents a much larger portion of the computer marketplace, particularly in both the business market (lots of money) and legacy market (poorly secured and patched old computers).

These two factors make Windows a preferable attack target. If you want to get as much money as you can from direct compromises, spending your time finding a compromise on Windows, even if it took 2-3 times more effort, would still be a better use of your time as you could compromise more businesses. Similarly, if you are trying to build out a bot net, the old and unpatched (and often pirated) legacy products used in much of the poorer parts of the world represent a greater potential for building botnets to send spam and sell other distributed black market services.

This doesn’t mean that Windows is less secure though. Hardening is most effective by tempering against threats. Windows faces many more threats, but also has many more eyes looking for holes to fix. The chance of an undiscovered bug on Windows is lower than on Mac as there are more people looking for them.

It isn’t that Mac is secure against being hacked. In fact, we still fairly regularly see compromises against Macs, particularly in the white hat community where it’s a bit more balanced since financial gain from exploiting is not the goal.

It is true that historically Windows has taken more of a backwards compatible and user controlled experience which lead to an average Windows system being less secure due to aging technologies that were designed for usability rather than security, but for a number of generations of Windows now (at least since Vista), Microsoft realized that the security landscape had changed and that usability came at too high of a cost.

They have greatly hardened the security of Windows (at a cost to usability of a lot of older software) and with Windows 10 implemented forced updates for users to help counter the issue of the swarms of unpatched Windows bots in the wild. It wasn’t that Microsoft was incapable of making a secure OS, but the threat landscape at the time favored usability over security (which would have necessarily broken older products that people still used.)

Apple, with their more tightly controlled ecosystem, was able to drop a lot of support more quickly to harden things and even was able to completely change the underlying basis of their OS on multiple occasions, where as the core Windows APIs have only really changed with major processor advances, and still maintained a high level of backwards compatibility.

So the short answer is no, Mac isn’t meaningfully more secure than Windows. They have different threat models due to the differences between the size and type of their userbase, but both have similar types of holes and ways of being compromised. Neither is perfectly secure. Windows took an approach that favored usability on the usability/security spectrum in the past, but adapted as the threat landscape changed to make such behavior too risky to both individuals and the greater Internet as a whole.