Kaspersky Lab Ready to Defend Apple Mac OS X

As Apple’s market share has grown, security analysts and vendors have forecast that Apple’s immunity to hacker attacks won’t last forever. Russian security vendor Kaspersky Lab has announced its readiness to defend Apple Mac OS X if it suddenly becomes a target of choice for hackers.

Kaspersky, based in Moscow, has no immediate plans to release an anti-virus product for Mac, but one could “be ready in just days,” spokesman Timur Tsoriev said at the CeBIT show in Germany. CeBIT is the world’s largest computer expo.

Kaspersky’s anti-virus technology is flexible enough to work on different operating systems, said CEO Eugene Kaspersky. The company’s analysts have also cracked open an iPhone, which runs a slimmed-down version of OS X, to see how it runs. “We see that Mac OS is taking a bigger and bigger share of the market,” Kaspersky said. “We made the prototype to be ready just in case.”

Infection of hard drive boot sectors has renewed, with boot kits being especially popular with cyber criminals.

While Windows machines outnumber Macs in businesses, it is a good idea for system administrators to regularly run security software on a Mac, especially if the machine is on a network with other Windows machines.

Malware is focused on file infection and antivirus programs are not able to treat them alone instead of simple termination.

In 2007 the number of malware for Mac OS substantially increased. But they totaled only 35, which is even lower than for mobile platforms (63 samples).