Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 8th Mar 2006 13:46 UTC, submitted by Hakime
Here are the results of the challenge launched by the Unversity of Wisconsin to test OS X against hacking. "The response has been very strong; traffic to the host spiked at over 30 Mbps. Most of the traffic, aside from casual web visitors, was web exploit scripts, ssh dictionary attacks, and scanning tools such as Nessus. The machine was under intermittent DoS attacks. During the two brief periods of denial of service, the host remained up. The test machine was a Mac mini (PowerPC) running Mac OS X 10.4.5 with Security Update 2006-001, had two local accounts, and had ssh and http open with their default configurations. There were no successful access attempts during the 38 hour duration of the test period."
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Member since:
2006-01-08
The Mini was running a fresh install of 10.4.5, the one that was hacked earlier was on 10.3.4
Since 99% of Mac users upgrade their previously insecure operating system instead of a fresh install, that leaves a substantial amount of Mac's with nice little backdoors open for hackers to return.
For instance, I used to be a Apple online support tech, I can tell you that during the URL Handler exploits, most users just updated their OS, instead of doing a fresh install.
As you know the URL handler exploits were widespread in the underground community for many months even after Apple was notified, they were even posed on Slashdot.
Many many users warned Apple, but they ignored them, they have since changed that behavior. Like they are now taking a closer look at all this automation they created for ease of use, which makes it easy to get tricked.
Apple can be a pompous ass sometimes.