The Security Mentor

Mac users have had a better security experience than Windows users. People like to debate the reasons but no matter what, the Mac runs software, software has bugs, and some bugs allow bad guys to take over your computer.

Someone named Tom Ferris found a picture which exposes a bug in some of Apple's image handling code. View this image and Safari crashes. It can allegedly crash the Finder as well. Don't visit Ferris's blog, he's got a copy of the crash-triggering image on it.

What does this mean for real people? Not much yet. It's a storm cloud on the horizon. Before you get hurt several more things would have to go wrong. First, this would have to be the kind of crash that can be turned into a security hole. Second, someone would have to figure out how to turn it into a security hole. That's not exactly easy, but it only takes one person and there's a lot more than one person qualified to do it. Third, bad guys would have to decide to deploy an attack that wouldn't work against the vast majority of personal computers.

Meantime, keeping your system software up to date is the best single defense.