One of the main reasons many of us turned to Apple’s machines and its OS X operating system is the belief that the company’s software is more secure than Windows, its biggest rival. However, Eugene Kaspersky, CEO and co-founder of Kaspersky, one of the industry’s leading security specialists, believes that Apple is “10 years behind Microsoft in terms of security,” and that Apple need to invest more into security audits for its software.
Thanks to the relatively success Flashback trojan that recently found its way onto more than 600,000 Macs, Kaspersky believes it’s only a matter of time before cyber criminals progress to create “more and more” malware for the Mac. He also predicts Apple will soon be facing the “same problems Microsoft had ten or 12 years ago.”
Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system was famously prone to a number of serious security risks, which forced the company to release Service Pack 2, which featured significant improvements to the software’s security. “Many believe that this engineering effort subsequently slowed down the development of future operating systems like Windows Vista,” The Verge reports.
And Kaspersky believes Apple must now make changes to the frequency of its own Mac OS X releases, spending more time on security audits for each release. “They [Apple] 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 says.
Apple has been quick to address security vulnerabilities — such as the Flashback trojan — in the past, and the company will soon introduce Mountain Lion, the next major release of OS X, which offers a new feature called Gatekeeper that is intended to prevent malicious infections from being installed on a Mac.
Of course, it could be argued that Kaspersky’s claims are exaggerated in a bid to encourage you to purchase the company’s antivirus products for Mac. However, there’s no denying that malware is becoming an issue for Mac users, and that we need to take it seriously.
[CBR Online via The Verge]
