Couple items here:
1. I also haven't seen a Mac virus since the bad old days of System 7.
Even then it was a rare event. I haven't had or read about any actual
Mac OSX viruses living the wild for years. Maybe I just do run in the
right circle of web sites.
2. There are lies and then there are statistics. Separating the two is
sometimes difficult. If the Mac had one known virus last year and there
were three this year that would be a 300% increase in the number of Mac
viruses. Astounding! The press would deem that the platform must be
plagued to near unusability. Meanwhile in the windows camp with the
114,000 known viruses, an increase of 1% is only another 1140 new
viruses. Have to be careful about the base from which the increases are
measured.
3. Viruses run on OSes and OSes run on hardware. So whether the Mac OS
runs on Intel, PowerPC or Motorola 68000 has no impact on the number of
viruses present or cross-platform transferability. The only exceptions I
know of are things like Word Macro viruses since Word runs on both
platforms and the usual web browser cross-site scripting hacks,
generally implemented in JavaScript.
4. Most of the drive pushing the creation of viruses these days are to
enslave people's machines to be part of a "botnet". The botnet master
can then deploy it to do various bad things, like hack captchas to get
free emails for spamming or swarm a site so its servers melt under the
load and deny service to legit users. To that end, if they are working
to write these viruses for financial or political gain they will be
going after the lowest hanging fruit to infect, that is, Windows PCs.
CB
Matt Emson wrote:
Lewis Brock wrote:
any system at all is vulnerable to attack. whether its direct port
hacking, viruses designed for specific functions or other methods
of destruction. no machine is safe at all. but the likelyhood of a
virus hitting a macintosh is incredibly incredibly slim. viruses are
designed by hackers who either just want to inflict pain on personal
users, bring down companies in one fowl swoop or whatever.
Actually, more commonly these days, the Virus writer (be it a worm,
trojan, or other malicious piece of code) intends to gather
information. This would be personal banking information or data to be
used to gain entry in to restricted sites (eBay, PayPal etc.) The
intention is to then sell this data on to someone who will use it to
gain funds or rip you off.
Another approach is to install a piece of code that will sit on your
computer and enable illegal activities to be routed through your
machine. This therefore covers the deviants tracks, and makes it look
like you did whatever the wrong doing was.
if an idiot writes a virus for a mac you get the impression straight
away that the idiot writing it has a vendetta against apple hardware.
maybe jealousy or something like that. or just malicious intent.
This is not the way virus work these days. Long gone are the kids in
bedrooms writing bad code to annoy innocent people. Today, the virus
writers want to gain revenue or illegal access.
antivirus packages have been out for the macintosh for many years now
and to be honest through my time I've never found the need for an
antivirus.
I have had at least 3 virus on my pre Mac OS X systems. Most were
under system 7 though. It can happen, it did happen and they do exist.
Mac OS X is based on Openstep, which was a UNIX variant created by
Next Computer. Being UNIX based (well, BSD), it is far less likely
that the average Virus writer can gain access. It's also hard to
install anything on a Mac OS X computer without being asked if you
want to, so that means it's also harder for a Mac Virus writer to
install software secretly.
the other probable reason for virus attacks on the mac could be this
and its only a supposable theory. Intel Architecture and the
connection with windows etc. as the PPC chips upto the G5 series
were never harmed by virus code. maybe apple should have thought
about it a bit more.
This is rubbish. Mac's with PowerPC processors had virus in the System
7.1 - 9.22 days. To say they didn't is just not correct. There weren't
many, but they did exist.
For the Intel platform, there has yet to be a mainstream Mac OS X
virus, just as for the PowerPC platform.
What you have to remember is, well, the difference between a PowerPC
application and an Intel application is minimal in functionality and
source code. To compile a PowerPC application for Intel using XCode is
trivial. The tools are free, and cross compilation from Intel to
PowerPC is possible. So any virus write targetting Intel could
feasably re-compile a virus to target PowerPC with little or no effort.
M
