Apple fanatics have one less tic mark to their list of all that is good.

Linux fanbois can continue their chest pumping, however.

Apple users tend to be a fanatical lot, often expressing their choice in pre-fabricated computing platforms as if it were a religious experience. There is no sense running down comparisons or arguing any points, it’d be just like arguing religion or politics.  This is really odd considering it is just an electronic device. Even if it comes in a pure white candy shell.

One of the common things to hear supporting the halo around Apple is that “Macs don’t have viruses”.  Apple even proclaims it in one of their Mac vs. PC ads, and on their website. Of course, this is false, but don’t try explaining that.  They also state that because they use a Unix base for Mac OS X, that there are little to no vulnerabilities.

But Thursday, in an international security conference called CanSecWest in Canada, there was a little hacking competition waged. The “PWN 2 OWN” competition featured a $10000 grand prize to hack into a laptop and steal a file. First one wins. Charlie Miller did it in 2 minutes.

The machine was running the latest Mac OS X version with all security patches. Due to agreements at the conference, the way he hacked it will not be revealed until after Apple has been fully notified of the breach. But the contest had stipulations that the contestant could only use software pre-installed on the system.  So, the likely vulnerability was Apple’s Safari web browser.

The thing is, he could have gone after any OS, as the three laptops offered for exploiting were one each of the Mac OS X, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu Linux varieties. Why did Miller choose to target the Mac? Because it was the easiest.

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Microsoft unleashed a suite of critical patches today for Windows XP and Office. Four for the former and two for the latter. They fix some potentially nasty security vulnerabilities. Probably ones that weren’t widely known about, but that everyone knows about now. So patch up people, and keep your system from becoming a zombie box.

If you are a non-IE user (like me), a great way to patch is to use WindizUpdate. Yeah, it sounds kinda hokey and the site almost makes it look like a bait for virii, but I’ve heard enough about the site to feel reasonably safe about using it (although, I accept no responsibility for anyone that chooses to use it). They have a small plugin you download and then you can use their site to download all the windows updates and install them automagically. This also allows you to ignore Microsoft WGA stuffs that borders on spyware.