The Army starts using Macs, more secure

Lieutenant Colonel C.J. Wallington is hoping the enemy won’t expect this army strategy: switching some of it’s computer base to Macs. The enemy, of course, is hackers.

Wallington, who is a division chief for the Army’s office of enterprise information systems, says that the army is quietly slipping Macs into it’s systems to make the computer base more stable against hackers. He says that adding Macs to the mix makes it harder to destabilize a group of military computers in a single attack, both because of the Mac’s security, and because if there is a mix of Mac and Windows, one virus can’t take them both out easily.

Charlie Miller, who made the news last August for remotely hacking the iPhone, says this wont be enough, and that Macs are behind the curve on security in comparison to Windows. He points, as many have lately, to data compiled by security firm Segunia, showing that Mac OS X was patched nearly 5 times more than Windows this year. Something to note, however, is that no-one has seemed to actually look at the types of patches that were released. It is probable that many of these OS X patches were not fixing anything that made the computer more vulnerable to hackers. In Windows, it is more likely that patches are designed to fix holes in ode which could allow for hacks.

Via [Forbes]