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We’ve got malware! Now what?
Recently there was a big slap in the face of the Mac community as the MacDefender malware garnered headlines from Tokyo to Johannesburg to Quebec; for the first time in the life of Mac OS X there was real danger on the horizon. Bad things have hit the fan and some people started fanning the flames of Ragnarök as surely this was the end of safety on the Mac as a platform. Right? Well, not quite. Don't get me wrong, there are lots of problems with all this and we should absolutely not take it lightly!
The blame for all this is hard to pin to any specific company or group of people, in my mind. There are so many different factors that we need to consider before passing judgement and in the end I'm not even sure we should be pointing a finger at anyone than our collective selves. Why do I say that, I hear you ask?
Users have been conditioned over so many years to not use their minds. We have all been force-fed modal dialog boxes with poorly phrased questions, cryptic error messages and generally illogical behavior in contrast and comparison to how "normal" people work and think. Sure, this has been less common on the Mac platform compared to Windows, but an awful lot of people have moved from Windows just to get away from all the bad stuff, malware included. Most people don't know the difference between a cleverly crafted webpage built to resemble a real Mac program and a real program. Nor do they know that Apple does not make any special toolkit for removing malware.
Users have also been conditioned to see "the computer" as something you can mess up infinitely and get away with it. While not all people are guilty of this, apparently a surprising amount of people disconnect their common sense when they sit down in front of a screen. You wouldn't let a dodgy bloke you just met on the street come inspect the electrical wiring or plumbing in your house, nor would you go driving in the worst imaginable terrain with your car. So why do we do just that with the computer? We frequently take our computers to the very suspect side of things, be it the shady websites draped in red lights and more skin than you'd find at a nudist beach or the open seas where pirate ships lurk behind every cove. Frankly I'm amazed this hasn't happened sooner than it did!
The number one important thing we somehow managed to forget in our haste to label Mac OS X the safest platform for regular folks, was that if the user isn't aware of security there isn't any real security. No system can truly compensate for all the junk a user can make the machine perform before things go really awry, come hell or malware! Of all the things that can be compensated for and built to be safe and impenetrable, the user remains the ultimately weakest link in the chain, quite able to override any safeguards we install on top of a solid foundation. Just like it doesn't matter how great the car is as long as you have a very poor driver behind the wheel, thing are bound to get messy.
But I absolutely don't want to rule Apple out of the blame fest either. They have been actively marketing the Mac OS X platform as the safest place to do your stuff for some time. Yes, they have not been really actively telling people that for a few years now, but the general illusion is very much still there. Now it's up to Apple to both build the system better so this won't happen as easily and I would prefer them to in some manner educate users in some computing common sense, so to speak. I have doubts they will do the latter, and in all fairness I understand why they wouldn't. But above all at least they should make the message clear that not even the Mac is impervious to bad software.
Going forward I believe we will see this pop up every now and then as the Mac OS X platform grows and attracts more people. The true problem won't be in the technical side of things, but in how the users are "trained" to perceive the machine. We really need to make an effort to educate people in just what can go wrong and what you should think about. Most people might know the terms and the basics of the threats, but far from well enough to be able to fend for themselves.
We all just need to repeat the mantra "all systems can get malware, one way or the other" until we truly understand it. Because any system really can get bad stuff. It's just a machine and it will do exactly as it's being instructed, nothing more and nothing less.
I'm still a Mac user and I plan to be until there is a vastly superior alternative available. Even though there are bad things out there that can attack my system, I'm not any more worried for myself and my computer's safety than I was before all this started. I can see the signs that point to dubious software and I know how to deal with it. I know there is no such thing as an Apple Advanced Malware Removal Kit or something along those lines. But I'm a nerd. It's my job to know these things. I'm not the norm and I know it.
Robert Falck
Robert is a freelance tech journalist from Sweden. You can follow his posts here on Bagel Tech or you can follow him on twitter @StreakMachine.
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Robert Falck