PCTips Box

Apple is riding a success wave fueled by the market performance of the Mac computers. And while the Cupertino-based hardware company was pushing in excess of 2.15 million Macs per month back in the third quarter of 2007, ahead of the advent of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, its proprietary operating system also grows its own market share in the background. Statistics delivered by Net Applications reveal that at the end of 2007, Mac OS X accounted for over 7% of the operating system market, just behind Vista which passed the 10% mark in December
of the past year.

But with the added Mac OS X audience also come inherent caveats. With an install base of in excess of 70 million users worldwide, Mac OS X is increasingly coming in the focus of attackers. The DNSChanger Trojan horse aimed at Apple’s operating system is an illustrative example of such a scenario. And as Mac OS X will increase its footprint on the operating system market, the threat landscape will react, responding with new threats tailored to the platform. (more…)

The iPhone, that extremely popular gadget built by the Cupertino company Apple, is one of the latest devices threatened by some malicious packages, as Orla Cox of Symantec today warned. What’s interesting is that this threat, if we can name it so, is not as dangerous as it may sound, because the only thing it does is to harm some of the applications deployed on the affected iPhone. The malicious file comes as a firmware update and is named “iPhone firmware 1.1.3 prep”. Its creators described the package “an important system update; install this before updating to the new 1.1.3 firmware”, according to the Symantec official. (more…)