October 17th, 2006

Apple gives you a virus on iPod, blames Microsoft

Posted by George Ou @ 5:33 pm

Categories: Apple, Security

Tags:

In a disgusting display of arrogance and insincerity, Apple shipped Video iPods loaded with a virus and blames Microsoft for not being "more hardy" against it.  Apple writes:

As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it.

Oh really!  How about a sincere apology for giving your users a dangerous product instead of passing the buck?  How in the world is it a Microsoft problem if Apple ships a malicious .EXE file to its customers?  If Microsoft or another company had shipped some CDs with Microsoft Office for Mac OS with a malicious Mac executable or a script that deleted all the user's files, would that be Apple's fault for not being "more hardy"?

There are people that are under the illusion that Mac exploits are impossible, but it clearly isn't the case.  This zero-day Safari exploit for example only demonstrated a flaw by enumerating the user's files but could have just as easily deleted all of them.  If it were a simple malicious executable packaged in to a commercial product for Mac OS X, it would be trivial to get a Mac user to launch it.  Based on Apple's standards, we would simply blame Apple for allowing the user to run the malicious code.

This isn't the first time Apple has shipped massively destructive products.  Past versions of iTunes would wipe out entire partitions for any Mac user unfortunate enough to have multiple partitions or drives.  If this had been any other company especially Microsoft, people would be calling for their heads instead of apologizing for them.

More on this from Ina Fried.