This story in TidBits didn't get much of a mention on the list Was
it an April Fools joke
John
Although 1999 seems an eternity ago, some things never change,
and today the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced
that it would be standardizing all of its computing functions on
Macs running Mac OS X. As with the Army's decision back in 1999,
the reason is security. Even though Microsoft continues to block
holes in Windows, we've seen an ever-increasing number of worm and
virus epidemics that have turned millions of Windows-based PCs
into zombie spam generators and resulted in many billions of
dollars of damage and cleanup costs.
Therein lies the difference since 1999. Although DHS remains
concerned about the security of its internal and external Web
sites, the real worry today is that the entire department could
be crippled by a virulent Windows worm or virus. The Army was
merely embarrassed by their Web site being modified, but a worm-
based attack on DHS computers could seriously compromise the
agency's ability to respond to a terrorist attack. DHS has been
particularly concerned about such attacks, issuing an alert in
March about a Windows program called Phatbot that brings peer-
to-peer networking concepts to malicious software.
Needless to say, the announcement is good news for Apple Computer,
since it will entail the purchase of hundreds of thousands of
Macintosh systems. Apple stock rose $4.01 on the announcement
as Wall Street took account of the future earnings.
It's important to remain realistic about the effects of DHS
switching to Mac OS X. In the past, Macs have been largely free of
worms and viruses at least in part because Macs weren't generally
used in "interesting" places (interesting, that is, to the sort of
people who write malicious software). Targets don't get much more
prominent than DHS, and I fully expect to see more hacking effort
aimed against Macs in the near future. Apple is not unaware of
this possibility either, and has already started advertising for
additional security engineers, as evidenced by the job posting
below (Apple ID required for login).
