| Saturday, January 14, 2006 |
17:47 - They like us! They really like us!
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,181602,00.html
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How to know you've made the big time:
Two two-day courses at this year's conference taught attendees techniques for forensic analysis of Mac OS X and the open-source Linux operating system.
John Sawyer, an IT security engineer who works for the University of Florida, took the OS X course and said it was very useful. His employer recently purchased a Mac for the IT department so that staff could become familiar with the platform, Sawyer said.
IT staffers at the university are increasingly finding malicious software, such as remote control "bot" programs running on Mac OS X, though most have had much experience analyzing the operating system for security breaches, said Jordan Wiens, a network security engineer also at the University of Florida.
Bots are a problem with any Unix, of course; but considering that the authorities' attention to a threat usually comes on the heels of the exploiters', this is a sign that Macs are getting prevalent enough that people are starting to see them as legitimate targets. The party may soon be over: the downside of runaway success.
Of course, I have to wonder whether the story's (and the seminar's) coverage of iPod shuffles as data-ferrying mechanisms isn't driven more by the fact that it's a buzzwordy device than by pragmatism, because there's no dearth of no-name keychain drives out there that can present the same security risk for far less cost—and far less risk that someone at the security desk will go, "Hey, is that the new iPod Mitochondrion? Can I see it? Lemme play some music!"
iPod, Xbox, Mac OS X, Linux, PSP. It's almost like they combed the headlines for the hottest products and built a seminar around the promise of letting a bunch of security geeks play with a room full of them. And then invited a bunch of reporters so they could list all those keywords in their own headlines.
Via JMH.
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Brian Tiemann
