Privacy Digest

Apples For The Army - Via Forbes.com:

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.

This past year was a particularly tough one for military cybersecurity. Cyberspies infiltrated a Pentagon computer system in June and stole unknown quantities of e-mail data, according to a September report by the Financial Times. Later in September, industry sources told Forbes.com that major military contractors, including Boeing (nyse: BA - news - people ), Lockheed Martin (nyse: LMT - news - people ), Northrop Grumman (nyse: NOC - news - people ) and Raytheon (nyse: RTN - news - people ) had also been hacked.

The Army's push to use Macs to help protect its computing corps got its start in August 2005, when General Steve Boutelle, the Army's chief information officer, gave a speech calling for more diversity in the Army's computer vendors. He argued the approach would both increase competition among military contractors and strengthen its IT defenses.

Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) computers still satisfy only a tiny portion of the military's voracious demand for computers. By Wallington's estimate, around 20,000 of the Army's 700,000 or so desktops and servers are Apple-made. He estimates that about a thousand Macs enter the Army's ranks during each of its bi-annual hardware buying periods.

Military procurement has long been driven by cost and availability of additional software--two measures where Macintosh computers have typically come up short against Windows-based PCs. Then there have been subtle but important barriers: For instance, Macintosh computers have long been incompatible with a security keycard-reading system known as Common Access Cards system, or CAC, which is heavily used by the military.

The Army's Apple program, created after Boutelle's 2005 address, is working to change that. As early as February 2008, the Army is planning to introduce software, developed by Arlington, Texas-based Thursby Software, that will also enable Mac desktops and laptops to use CAC systems--a change that should make it easier to get Macs into the service.

Though Apple machines are still pricier than their Windows counterparts, the added security they offer might be worth the cost, says Wallington. He points out that Apple's X Serve servers, which are gradually becoming more commonplace in Army data centers, are proving their mettle. "Those are some of the most attacked computers there are. But the attacks used against them are designed for Windows-based machines, so they shrug them off," he says.

(Read Original Article - Via Forbes.com .)