Apple in danger of becoming the new M$
 

Full of holes that are slow to patch

APPLE USERS' long running feeling of invulnerability to viruses is starting to take a battering, and the outfit is proving that it is at least as bad as Microsoft in dealing with them.

Security researcher Tom Ferris has blown the whistle on Apple's slow reaction to patching saying that he gave the Cappuccino based outfit notice of several serious security bugs in January and they failed to patch them.

He had to go public to name the vulnerabilities before people got caught by them. He listed more than seven vulnerabilities and Associated Press has found a couple of people who had been caught.

Ferris, who is a Mac user, said that Apple is in the same state that Microsoft was a few years ago and unable to react to weaknesses in its products.

Apple says that it did plan to patch the holes reported by Ferris in the next automatic update of Mac OS X. Ferris trotted out the old line that now Apple has become popular it was attracting the attention of hackers, particularly those on rogue web-sites.

However, there is no indication that Apple's have become more popular. It is possible, however, that even with only a five per cent market share, hackers have suddenly woken up to the fact that there are a lot of easy marks running around without any protection because they believe that they are invulnerable. More here.