Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Congrats Apple!

Apple has a release an update to the iPhone to fix security problems in advance of the BlackHat conference.

This is a faster response than any other mobile manufacturer. In our experience working in this area, security fixes get lost from the software maker to the device manufacturer to the mobile service provider. None of them wants to own the process, so bugs either don't get fixed, or get fixed late.

In contrast, Apple as set a record for responding to security problems quickly, and proven that their new business model of owning the customer experience (rather than having companies like at&t or Verizon own the experience) is paying off. Wall Street analysts should pay attention to this, it's actually pretty important.

Unfortunately for Apple, hackers aren't really attacking the other phones, so customers don't realize that the smart phone they are using now (based on such platforms as BlackBerry, Symbian, Linux, or Windows Mobile) are just as vulnerable as the iPhone. This is just desserts for Apple, since they've been exploiting the same phenomenon with Windows vs. Mac OS X.

Now if Apple could just be nicer to researchers...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

what's more -- they even give credit to researchers. Who knew! Tell David.

Anonymous said...

Great presentation this morning at Blackhat... Definitely looking forward to seeing the hamster and ferret releases from errata

mount said...

Researchers? Well anyone who is signed up as an apple developer (free or fee) has access to developer implementation tools which will allow them to write apps for the iPhone... no need to reinvent the wheel...

Alk3m1st said...

mount, it was probably in reference to apples dealings in the past with security researchers that have found vulnerabilities in their products/OS. I think the famous one was the wifi vulnerability in a macbook...