It was only a matter of time… the Apple platform becomes a target

Unfortunately it appears all of those Macs that have been procured are going to need to pay more attention to security matters, really soon.  The days of not having to worry about a virus, worm or any other security matter are coming to a close.  Heck, that door needs to be officially shut now.

I think we’ve all known this for a long time.  As any platform gets popular, it’s going to become an attractive target for criminals.  That’s just the law of physics.  So it didn’t surprise me to see the article, “iBotnet: Researchers find signs of zombie Macs” written by Ryan Naraine published today.  Was it really a question of IF?  No, probably not.  It was really a question of when.

Now granted, the origins of the problem stem from the use of pirated copies of some Apple programs.  I don’t even need to read the article to surmise the rest.  Why people download “free” software like this is beyond me.  How the hell would anyone know what an executable program does from an untrusted source?  The answer is that you don’t.  And it doesn’t matter if you are using a Mac, Linux or Windows.

The moral of this story is pretty simple.  If you are a Mac user, you need to start paying more attention to what is coming and it should be no surprise that you are going to need good tools to defend against the coming attacks. 

You can debate the merits of the story, but I think common sense should probably prevail here.  As the number of Mac users grows, so does the interest of criminals.  They aren’t going to ignore that target.  It isn’t a matter of if.