Macs are a doddle to hack

A MAC enthusiast has managed to prove that his favourite brand of computer is dead easy to take over.

According to ZDNet, the Swedish-based Mac fan set up his Mac Mini on the Interweb and invited hackers to break through the computer's security and gain root control.

Within six hours the "rm-my-mac" competition resulted with a hacker called "Gwerdna," gaining the necessary access.

Gwerdna said it only took him half an hour because a Mac is "easy pickings". He said that despite the common assumption of Mac owners that their boxes were harder to hack than Windows, there were shedloads of unpublished exploits for the computers.

He said that even if the Mac had been better set up it would not have stopped him. But he added that the Mac OS X doesn't have the market share to really interest most serious bug finders, who are apparently much happier taking over Windows machines.

According to Rixstep here, although Tiger does sort out a lot of these issues, one of the main problems is that OS X is not true Unix.

The site says that no self-respecting Unix designer would be so stupid as to allow arbitrary code to run as root without authentication. µ