Apple has made some pretty ambitious, not to mention arrogant, statements in the last year. Particularly in their “Political Ad” style of advertisement, statements that–at the very least–imply that Macintosh has built a completely flawless operating system exempt from viral attack. This is *not* so. While it is true that the amount of exploits are comparatively few in number, many security experts believe that maliciously exploiting something with fewer than five per cent market share is not worthwhile. But, thanks in part to their advertisement, the Apple OSX operating system is becoming increasingly popular, and with this popularity comes coders with malicious intent. The introduction of six new threats in the first half of 2006 were, as it happens, not *that* new; past experiences with more popular operating systems show that those holes were probably already there just waiting to be exploited by a malicious coder, as is the case with most security holes on any operating system.
A Fine Line Between Boldness and Arrogance
There was a recent batch of Apple’s hit media player–specifically the iPod video–shipped with a Windows-Based Trojan. These “tainted pods” have been flagged on Apple’s website.
“The iPod nano, iPod shuffle and Mac OS X are not affected, and all Video iPods now shipping are virus free. As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it.”
Those few words speak volumes for themselves, but to the bottom of these Bad Apples: According to a statement by the company, only about 1% of the Video iPods produced since September 12th were tainted. It claims that only it received only 25 reports of the Windows-based Trojan virus on iPod video devices. Apple blamed the failure to catch this virus before it propagated to the public on the company it contracted to manufacture the devices. They pushed that the Trojan — called “RavMonE.exe” — was well-known to malware and anti-viral applications. Moreover, running such applications in addition to updating to the latest version of iTunes would protect concerned consumers. Although Apple expresses its remorse, it warns all consumers to scan new or suspect removable memory devices for this Trojan, but Apple’s its condemnation of the Operating System used by a large portion of its consumers isn’t sitting well. Furthermore, merely blaming a manufacturer isn’t enough for some, and as the manufacturer was contracted by Apple, Apple is still being considered to be ultimately at fault.
My Take
I’m not particularly surprised by Apple’s otherwise surprising lack of tact in a rather sensitive matter, especially when producing a hardware product en masse like the iPod video quality control on every device is nearly impossible especially when the manufacture and quality control is exported outside the mother company’s control. It is my sincere hope that this will snap consumers out of their perceived notion that Apple, or any other company, can (of course) do no wrong, as most such eye-opening incidents prove to the world.
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