Macs not secure?

Tue Sep 2 19:50:10 GMT 2003 Macs not secure?

Mac folk bask in in the smug satisfaction that our OS X is not susceptible to the same sort of security nonsense that Windows is.

T'aint necessarily so, says This MacFixit blurb.

The actual article shows several examples of buffer overflow attacks to get root access. What it doesn't specifically talk about is what programs might still be vulnerable to such attacks, although it does give dark warnings about BSD and Fink ports.

This is just one of the many reasons I am loathe to use other people's code. I'm a fairly lousy programmer, but at least I know what I'm writing and can (usually) understand what I wrote. As tempting as all the goodies are out there, I leave 'em be unless I really, really need it and can't even begin to write something that will work well enough for me.

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