And let’s face it, even if you run Windows you don’t really need to run anti-virus either if you practice good web-habits. But with the amount of idiots running OSX on their shiny Macbooks – malware may well become a problem for the platform.

It’s not a problem right now, the stats for malicious software on Apple platforms are still minuscule compared to the threats on Windows and even on Linux.

Sophos released a free of charge Mac anti-virus product for consumers on Tuesday in a bid to highlight the growing security risk against the platform and to shake fanbois out of their complacency.

The business-focused internet security firm is making Sophos Anti-Virus Home Edition for Mac available for download at no charge – with no time limit, and requiring no registration. The technology is a cut-down version of Sophos’s pre-existing anti-virus software for Macs and will ship with detection of thousands of malware strains including Trojans and rootkits. Sophos has no plans to release an equivalent free of charge Windows anti-malware scanner.

Three well-established freebie security scanners (AVG, Avast, Avira) already exist even without considering Microsoft’s own Security Essentials software. Although commercial anti-virus packages for Macs have been sold for some time by the likes of Intego and Symantec – and more recently by Kaspersky and Panda – Sophos’s software one of very few freebie scanners for Macs available to date.

It’s a pretty interesting move from Sophos tho, business wise, as they have no plans into strong-arming users into paying for a commercial version by releasing a crappy crippled version under the guise of ‘free’ software.

Sophos has always been a company with strong technology, so even as freeware I’d expect this to be fairly capable software. There are other commercial AV systems out their for Mac – but this is the first one from a reputable vendor that is free. I mean there’s ClamAV – but in all honestly who would want to rely on that?

It’s not the first freebie scanner for Macs currently available, contrary to claims in the first version of this article. Others including, most notable, ClamAV exist.

Past threats to Mac users have included malware disguised as pirated software and uploaded onto P2P file-sharing networks, supposed video codecs that actually contain a Mac-specific Trojan horse and strains of Windows malware capable of infecting virtual installations of Windows running on a Mac.

Apple acknowledged the malware problem by integrating rudimentary protection against a handful of Mac Trojans in Snow Leopard, Sophos notes, arguing that users running its software are provided with more comprehensive protection against potential threats.

Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos, explained that while the picture is different in enterprise environments, “home Mac users aren’t protecting themselves from malware”.

Theriault admitted that Windows threats counted in their millions dwarf the number of strains of Mac malware, which can be counted in their thousands, but maintained there was a need for protection, whatever sales people in Apple Stores might say to the contrary. “We want to raise awareness,” she explained.

Either way it’s an interesting move from Sophos and we’ll have to see where it goes from here. They claim they won’t charge for it, but who knows? And will this pressure other AV vendors that have paid versions for Mac to release free versions for Home users. Much like the Windows vendors do (Avira, Avast!, AVG etc).

More on the software, together with hardware compatibility information, can be found out from a download micro-site here:

Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition

Source: The Register

Apple has admitted that is has at LEAST three serious design weaknesses in it’s new application based firewall being rolled out with Mac OS X ‘Leopard’.

It comes (somewhat oddly) only 24 hours after a Mac OS X security update that fixed 41 OS X and Safari security vulnerabilities.

Previously independent researchers proved that Apple’s claim that the Leopard firewall could block all incoming connections was false.

In an advisory accompanying the Mac OS X v10.5.1 update, Apple admitted that the “Block all incoming connections” setting for the firewall is misleading.

“The ‘Block all incoming connections’ setting for the Application Firewall allows any process running as user “root” (UID 0) to receive incoming connections, and also allows mDNSResponder to receive connections. This could result in the unexpected exposure of network services,” Apple said.

With the fix, the firewall will more accurately describe the option as “Allow only essential services”, and by limiting the processes permitted to receive incoming connections under this setting to a small fixed set of system services, Apple said

Sounds like they are back-pedaling rather fast. They also addressed two other issues with the application based firewall.

CVE-2007-4703: The “Set access for specific services and applications” setting for the Application Firewall allows any process running as user “root” (UID 0) to receive incoming connections, even if its executable is specifically added to the list of programs and its entry in the list is marked as “Block incoming connections”. This could result in the unexpected exposure of network services.

CVE-2007-4704: When the Application Firewall settings are changed, a running process started by launchd will not be affected until it is restarted. A user might expect changes to take effect immediately and so leave their system exposed to network access.

So watch out, Apple is not the panacea of security as some people claim it to be.

Source: ZDNet

Judging by figures alone, Vista is more secure than Mac OSX and Linux? I somehow find this a rather strange claim, I guess these things are always subjective.

Most numbers can be moulded into any shape you want, and can show any result you like.

According to the numbers given in a new report from Microsoft, Windows Vista has blown away all the major enterprise Linux distributions and Mac OS X as far as having the smallest amount of serious security vulnerabilities in the six months since its release. The numbers were compiled by Jeff Jones, the security strategy director in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group.

“The results of the analysis show that Windows Vista continues to show a trend of fewer total and fewer High severity vulnerabilities at the 6-month mark compared to its predecessor product Windows XP (which did not benefit from the SDL [Secure Development Lifecycle] and compared to other modern competitive workstation OSes (which also did not benefit from an SDL-like process),” Jones wrote in a blog posting about the report on June 21.

I’ve heard some things about this report though, for example flaws in Firefox WERE counted under Linux, but flaws in IE were NOT counted under Vista.

In the report, available as a PDF download on Jones’ blog, Jones compares the number of vulnerabilities of critical, medium and low severity that have been discovered in Vista with those found in Windows XP, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Workstation, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS—Reduced Component Set, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.8, Novell SLED 10—Reduced Component Set and Apple Mac OS X v10.4.

The score, according to Jones: In the first six months of the Vista life cycle, Microsoft has released four major security bulletins that address 12 total vulnerabilities affecting Windows Vista.

Plus the amount of software packages included in these linux distributions are 100x times more than those in Vista, so it’s not really a fair comparison is it? I’m sure you if you counted core services and OS system files, the figures would look a lot different.

It’s a pretty comprehensive article, so do check it out and let us know what you think.

Source: Eweek