Mac (in)security: How to secure Macs in business

As Macs make their way into the enterprise, IT needs to address these six security flaws before disaster strikes

 

Matasano Chargen's Ptacek says that Back to My Mac will eventually fall under the category of services that businesses ban their employees from using in the office. "Enterprise users are not allowed to use Gmail or Yahoo Mail," he notes, and Back to My Mac should be treated the same.

Solution: Confirm that Back to My Mac won't work in your environment. Establish a policy that bans its use.

Security flaw No. 5: Complacency over malware
The recent appearance of a kit that lets malicious parties install Trojan horses in legitimate software to, in turn, obtain root access to a Mac seems to run counter to the widely held view that Macs are immune from many of the exploits that once plagued Windows (and that Vista has ameliorated).

But that Trojan horse doesn't meet the smell test: Like a few other "concept attacks," the exploit requires that someone download and install software, although no password is required for the malware to run. (The exploit relies on the escalated privileges available for the Apple Remote Desktop agent, or ARDAgent, even when it's turned off. An AppleScript command can be sent to the agent, which is handed off as a root-level shell command.) A survey of security experts and the buzz among the Mac enterprise management community shows that this threat is a nonstarter.

The fact is that the Mac has not been a malware target, and it is safer than Windows from such threats. And that's where the risk lies: The Mac is safer from malware today, and there's very little concern about the Mac being a gateway to infecting Windows users.

But that may not be true in the future, and there is some concern that IT won't be ready to protect Macs from malware when that day comes.

Today most of those who follow Mac security closely seem to abjure anti-virus software. "It's not unreasonable to use anti-virus in an enterprise, especially if compliance is an issue," says Mogull -- but "I wouldn't necessarily recommend that for a consumer," he adds, because today's anti-virus apps don't address Mac OS X's actual risk profile today. "Anti-virus is an industry failure," Ptacek says. Because of this, he can't recommend that companies install anti-virus software at all.

Dino Dai Zovi, an independent security researcher, is concerned about acceleration in this area. "Because there is still very little malware in the wild targeting Apple, it is still a safe platform, and it is in a lot of ways safer than the Windows equivalent. But I think that that time is rapidly changing," he says.

Mogull cautioned that the worst could be yet to come. "It isn't that the Mac is immune or even more resistant to these attacks, there just hasn't been very much interest in them," he says, a sentiment echoed by security experts and IT managers. With more Macs in the enterprise, it's likely that attacks designed to extract information or take over Macs to use them as zombies will hit the wild.