Army Buys More Macs To Improve Security

In the ongoing platform fanboy battle against Jesse James, I relish every opportunity, every salvo I can gather to launch at his (easily hackable and crashable) Microsoft fortress. Today, the men and women who fight in real life, have given me some ammunition of their own: The US Army has been increasing their Apple hardware buying in an effort to diversify its computer network and make it more secure.

Due to recent, highly publicized attacks on the Pentagon and the computer networks of military contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the Army has been looking to toughen up its computer networks to make them less vulnerable to hacker spies and other malicious attackers:

[Lieutenant Colonel C.J. Wallington] 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.

Efforts to integrate Apple hardware into the Army's networks had previously been hampered by software incompatibilities, most notably the inability to use the Common Access Cards utilised ubiquitously by the Army for login authentication, but recent efforts spearheaded by General Steve Boutelle, the Army's CIO, have led to development of software drivers for CACs and other necessary drivers for Apple systems. With these barriers now gone, the Army has now begun increasing the buying rate of Apple computers.

Go Army!

Apples For The Army [Forbes]
[via: MacRumors]