X
Business

Macs join the Army - Hooah!

The Army turns to Apple to help bolster cyber security.
Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Senior Contributing Editor

The Army turns to Apple to help bolster cyber security:

Given Apple's marketing toward the young and the trendy, you wouldn't expect the U.S. Army to be much of a customer. Lieutenant Colonel C.J. Wallington is hoping hackers won't expect it either.

Wallington, a division chief in the Army's office of enterprise information systems, says the military is quietly working to integrate Macintosh computers into its systems to make them harder to hack. That's because fewer attacks have been designed to infiltrate Mac computers, and adding more Macs to the military's computer mix makes it tougher to destabilize a group of military computers with a single attack, Wallington says.

You might be surprised to hear me say this, but I think that this is a very sensible idea.  Why?  Because having a diverse set of platforms does help security.  While we can argue about whether Macs are fundamentally any more secure than Windows, running on a single platform is also asking for trouble.

The number of Macs in use is higher than I would have guesses - around 20,000 of the Army's 700,000 desktops and servers have the Apple logo on them.

Now, what I want to know is, does Apple supply the hardware in a camo motif?

Editorial standards