Oh dear.

While the author raises some important questions, the amount of ignorance he shows (or is it a deliberate desire to mislead?) brings to mind a word that rhymes with merchant banker.

He confesses that he really hasn't any experience or deep knowledge, raises areas of concern where he says he doesn't know, yet opens with the pontification that "Apple's OS X is not safer or less susceptible to vulnerabilities and viruses than other OSes".

Which other OSes is he referring to?

No - OS X is not immune to buffer overflow bugs or the potential for privilege escalation exploits. However to say that it is not safer than the Swiss cheese security that comes out of Redmond is absurd.

It doesn't ship with ports open by default. It doesn't ship with a root account enabled, it doesn't ship with a registry (Hallelujah!), it doesn't auto execute attachments, even the administrator account is only a normal user until they authenticate for each task requiring higher privileges.

Is it perfect? No. Should Apple communicate more rather than less. Sure. Is the opening claim of the story accurate? Only if you choose not to think too hard.

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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/256/27573#27573