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A comment on The level of Mac malware is not acceptable, says Apple exec at Epic trial.

Re:The level of Mac malware is not acceptable, says Apple ex... by AuthorizedCust on Thursday May 20, 2021 @10:14AM (#27221341)
It’s surprising seeing an Apple exec say this, after years of messaging around Mac’s security superiority.

Also, what does this mean!?

> …Mac users … are subject to a way less economically motivated attacker base.

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Re:The level of Mac malware is not acceptable, says Apple ex... by dfxm12 on Thursday May 20, 2021 @10:26AM (#27221511)
“Dark Caracal is part of a trend we’ve seen mounting over the past year whereby traditional APT actors are moving toward using mobile as a primary target platform,” said Mike Murray, Vice President of Security Intelligence at Lookout.

Phones more reliably have info that attackers are looking for and can exploit or sell, so they are becoming/have become a more coveted target than the desktop. Payment methods, personal info, etc. It's worth pointing out Federighi is comparing Mac users (desktop) to iOS users (mobile). Plus, there are probably more iOS users out there than macOS users.

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-and-lookout-uncover-n...

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Re:The level of Mac malware is not acceptable, says Apple ex... by throw0101a on Thursday May 20, 2021 @10:18AM (#27221379)
> [...] after years of messaging around Mac’s security superiority.

Just because something may be superior does not mean it's (a) perfect or even (b) as good as it could be.

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Re:The level of Mac malware is not acceptable, says Apple ex... by jolux on Thursday May 20, 2021 @10:18AM (#27221383)
>It’s surprising seeing an Apple exec say this, after years of messaging around Mac’s security superiority.

Well, the situation is still not nearly as bad as Windows, though it's arguable how much of that is technical and how much is statistical.

>Also, what does this mean!?

iOS users vastly outnumber macOS users, and have a much larger market share of smartphones than Macs have of desktops.

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Re:The level of Mac malware is not acceptable, says Apple ex... by m12k on Thursday May 20, 2021 @11:38AM (#27222557)
>Also, what does this mean!? >> …Mac users … are subject to a way less economically motivated attacker base.

It means there are much fewer Mac users than iOS users so there's a bigger economic reward for bypassing iOS security (plus iOS also comes with more ways to exploit hacked devices economically, such as sending texts to for-pay numbers, intercepting security tokens for account take-over, Apple Pay and more)

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Re:The level of Mac malware is not acceptable, says Apple ex... by joshstrange on Thursday May 20, 2021 @10:16AM (#27221357)
I assume that means "Since the Mac has less market share, it doesn't have as much focus on hacking it since you will be attacking a smaller slice of the pie (verses something like Windows).
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Re:The level of Mac malware is not acceptable, says Apple ex... by fdroidmstrrce on Thursday May 20, 2021 @10:26AM (#27221506)
And users are significantly less likely to be doing Engineering/finance/etc... And more likely to be on Facebook during a college lecture.
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Re:The level of Mac malware is not acceptable, says Apple ex... by nemothekid on Thursday May 20, 2021 @10:32AM (#27221585)
>And users are significantly less likely to be doing Engineering/finance/etc

Most of Silicon Valley are using macs as well; it’s pretty much the defacto platform for FAANG.

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Re:The level of Mac malware is not acceptable, says Apple ex... by fdroidmstrrce on Thursday May 20, 2021 @10:40AM (#27221699)
Bold claim considering it's for Front end work exclusively. I don't need to tell anyone here backend is all Linux, data is MS or Linux, embedded is never Mac, and (Physical) Engineering is MS.

Still front end FAANG is a tiny sliver of the population.

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Re:The level of Mac malware is not acceptable, says Apple ex... by nemothekid on Thursday May 20, 2021 @12:33PM (#27223371)
I mean it’s a not a claim. At Facebook (backend / production engineering) the vast majority of employees used the company provided MacBook Pros running macOS; not just front end. Similar story at Google.

I can’t speak for the rest of the country but most people even at the startups I’ve seen are using MacBook Pros. (FWIW I currently do embedded work on a mac)

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Re:The level of Mac malware is not acceptable, says Apple ex... by moshmosh on Thursday May 20, 2021 @01:04PM (#27223857)
Flyover country checking in. Non- or semi-technical bigcos of the sort with big IT departments who take most of a week to get you your laptop when you start, are almost all Windows but may tolerate some macOS. Technical bigcos are mixed Win/macOS, with the business side preferring Windows and the tech people all on Macs. Smaller tech companies are all Mac, pretty much universally. Every now and then you get the one weirdo whose laptop can never connect to the projector and whose screen sharing always fucks up on calls or takes 5 minutes to get their bluetooth headset working, because they're on Linux (disclaimer: many years ago, I've been that weirdo). I've only seen one shop that was mostly Linux + Windows with little or no Mac presence, and they were in hardware (drivers or proprietary libs for embedded devices can be hard to come by Macs).
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Re:The level of Mac malware is not acceptable, says Apple ex... by fdroidmstrrce on Thursday May 20, 2021 @04:20PM (#27226653)
I can firmly say this does not match the United States at all.

Occasionally you have a need for an iOS dev, but outside of that Mac's are not used professionally.

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Re:The level of Mac malware is not acceptable, says Apple ex... by fdroidmstrrce on Thursday May 20, 2021 @04:17PM (#27226607)
Arduino?

Every embedded job I've had was exclusively Linux and MS.

Even the Apple fanboys at work knew better and accepted the reality of the situation.

Currently doing tools for a f500 and there's not a Mac in the office.

I have a high degree of skepticism. 0 Macs out of 6 companies, yet you say they are abundant? Doubt.

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Re:The level of Mac malware is not acceptable, says Apple ex... by nemothekid on Thursday May 20, 2021 @08:40PM (#27229231)
>Arduino?

Largely our own SoC based on Nvidia's Jetson platform. I'm not sure what you mean by the "reality of the situation". macOS is UNIX based platform and, unless you are doing kernel work, I find that doing work on macOS is pretty much what you would expect if you were using a BSD based platform. I'm not sure what limitations there would be that you wouldn't find on Windows or even a separate distro. In fact I'd rather be working on an aarch64 MacBook if I was targeting an aarch64 cloud.

>I have a high degree of skepticism. 0 Macs out of 6 companies, yet you say they are abundant? Doubt.

I'm only speaking of Silicon Valley tech companies. I'm sure a F500 like Target or American Airlines wouldn't want to spend as much on developer hardware.

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Re:The level of Mac malware is not acceptable, says Apple ex... by ghaff on Thursday May 20, 2021 @10:15AM (#27221352)
Presumably a much smaller user base than Windows.

ADDED: I read it as less economically interesting than other desktop platforms but, reading another comment, he may have been contrasting MacOS with iOS--which probably makes more sense.

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Re:The level of Mac malware is not acceptable, says Apple ex... by dijit on Thursday May 20, 2021 @10:23AM (#27221461)
But iPhones have a much higher install base and have less malware than OSX or windows.

Obviously the reason is because it’s locked down- but it belies the point a little to say that something has a large install base therefore it’s attacked more therefor it’s insecure. The opposite should be true but we take it for a given that it can’t be- when we have evidence to the contrary in other areas.

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Re:The level of Mac malware is not acceptable, says Apple ex... by ghaff on Thursday May 20, 2021 @10:36AM (#27221650)
The statement is a bit confusing but I think he's basically saying that: In spite of the fact that the Mac isn't a particular malware target (presumably because of some combination of its market share/security model), it still gets more malware than iOS does--so applying the MacOS security model to iOS wouldn't work."
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