There Will Be No Mac BotNet

post from Mac Geekery - Get your geek on. on 26 April 2006 12:36:26 PM. © Mac Geekery - Get your geek on.

There's a lot of people that misunderstand security risks. This includes popular bloggers on popular weblogs, like Infinite Loop it would appear.

And speaking of exploiting bugs, a related report on the increase of malware in the last year focuses on the doubling of Linux threats, but specifically warns that Macs are likely to become "the biggest alternative target to Windows in 2006," between the errors made in system development, the recent processor switch, and the growing demand for zombie machines to spew spam and host malicious web sites, we could have a big problem on our hands.

Aside from being a run-on sentence, this statement is completely horrid in another way: it's misleading. By default, Mac OS X does not ship with any network services running. None. Not a one. Out of the box Mac OS X is not sharing files, running SSH, sharing its printers, or even exposing the CUPS configuration page to anything but the loopback port – and most consumers are running it in that default configuration. If you portscan a fresh install of Mac OS X, you get bupkis.

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