Apple iMac is More Secure Than The PC

As the use of computers becomes a part and parcel of our daily lives, more of our personal data including details of our bank accounts gets stored in it. This exposes us to serious security risks if our computers are compromised. Imagine a situation if you find one day that someone used your credit card to make thousand of dollars in purchases. The best way to prevent such a situation involves securing our computers.

However, the idea of securing a computer is easy said than done for an average computer user. With increasing incidents of virus attacks and other malicious hacking attempts, securing our computers can be a major headache. So it is important to opt for a system that is inherently secure and in this respect there is hardly a better one than the Apple iMac.

Now if you are curious to know what makes iMac so much secure than your typical PC, then just read on as we discuss the subject in detail.

Robust Operating System

iMacs have their own operating system which is commonly referred to OS X. As compared to using the Windows operating which is filled with bugs and which needs to be patched every other day from security vulnerabilities, using the OS X is a smooth affair. It is able to take care of most security threats thanks to its robust design. The current iMacs ship with Mac OS X version 10.5 also known as the “Leopard”. Some the security features that it boasts of include:

1. Application Layer Firewall – The Leopard apparently ships with two specific firewalls that are designed to protect it from myriad security threats. Of them the Application Layer Firewall tends to function in the socket layer and can make intelligent filtering decisions based on individual application basis.

2. Sandboxes – The Leopard boasts of a security feature called sandbox which essentially implements a role based system for access control. So if an application is not supposed to perform a certain role it can restrict the same. For example you have an email client application and it has been compromised by a virus. Now if it attempts to change the system password or tries to perform anything that is not an expected activity by an email client, then the sandbox can automatically detect it and block it. This feature makes the iMac way more secure that a typical PC

3. Application signing- It includes a structured framework that uses public key signatures for verifying applications and also check if they have been tampered with. So any compromised application can be easily detected.

Quantifiably Lesser Number of Threats

Apart from its inherent strength, the iMac also benefits from the fact that there are relatively very few viruses doing the rounds that target it. In fact, a vast majority of the viruses are targeted towards the Windows-based systems and these include the most potent ones. So while a Conflicker or SoBig virus were known to take out entire computer networks of large corporations, the iMac incidentally remained unaffected and secure.