By Deb Shinder for Win7News.net published by GFI Vipre

It’s “common knowledge” that Mac users don’t have to worry about all those pesky security issues that plague PC people, right? “Everyone knows” that OS X Leopard and Lion are just inherently more secure than any Microsoft OS. In fact, whenever one of my friends switches to Apple, he/she invariably tells me one of the reasons is “better security.”

And at one point in time, everybody “knew” the earth was the center of the universe – until Copernicus came along and debunked that theory. Even after he proved that the prevailing geocentric model of the universe wasn’t valid, people were slow to accept the new truth, and 17th century astronomer/physicist Galileo (now known as the father of modern science) was tried for heresy for his defense of heliocentrism (the belief that the earth revolves around the sun).

I spent last week in sunny Las Vegas, attending the BlackHat and Defcon security conferences. There were a number of interesting presentations taking place, and right out of the gate one of the first talks, called “Macs in the Age of the APT,” made a big splash. For those who don’t know, APT standards for Advanced Persistent Threat, or targeted attacks that take advantage of simple weaknesses in networks and systems, along with social engineering techniques and custom malware, especially those suspected to be perpetuated by nation-states such as the Chinese attack on Google in 2010:

http://www.win7news.net/110811-Advanced-Persistent-Threat

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This excerpt is shared with permission from Win7News.net published by GFI Vipre.

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