Are Macs “safer” than Windows-based PCs? That seems to be the common belief despite the fact that there have been several times when Macs were exhibiting some severe security flaws. That being said, this isn’t to say that Apple hasn’t been trying to keep OS X as secure as possible, but despite their best efforts security researcher Patrick Wardle claims that they are “trivial”.Speaking at the RSA Conference, Wardle was quoted as saying (as transcribed by Threat Post), “Gatekeeper doesn’t verify an extra content in the apps. So if I can find an Apple-approved app and get it to load external content, when the user runs it, it will bypass Gatekeeper.” For those unfamiliar, Gatekeeper is one of the tools employed by Apple to prevent malware from running on OS X machines.
How it works is that it only allows apps from the Mac App Store to run on their computers with the knowledge that whoever reviewed the apps has found them to be secure. However one layer of security isn’t enough by Apple’s standards which is why they have also employed another tool called XProtect, which according to Wardle is just as trivial to bypass.
At the end of the day, Wardle states that in theory Apple’s methods of protecting their systems are sound, but there are too many vulnerabilities on the kernel-level that can be exploited to get around security measures Apple has in place. “If Macs were totally secure, I wouldn’t be here talking. It’s trivial for any attacker to bypass the security tools on Macs.”