On Friday, September 17, 2004, at 11:44 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
At 11:13 PM -0700 09/17/2004, Zoltan Batiz wrote:I guess I'd throw in my two bits in this thread. There hasn't been a publicly announced virus on the Macintosh platform in over 3 years.
So you missed all the bruha.
This doesn't mean that we will never see one, but it does mean that the Mac in general is going to be much safer than a PC. . .for now.
The Mac community is asleep. We're ripe 'n' ready to pluck. tick tick tick
You really don't understand how modern viruses work, do you?
They don't get attached to programs anymore; they're all e-mailed. They don't know how to differentiate between Mac's, PC's, or Commodore 64's for that matter. They spread widely with the presumption that the large majority of their recipients are running a compatible OS.
A Mac virus will be a dud in 95+% of the systems it gets sent to. This will fatally limit it's spread. The one Mac-specific e-mail virus ever, 'Simpsons', never got anywhere, and it depended on a specific feature of, yep, you got it, MS Outlook. In OS 9.
They cannot spread fast enough to outrun detection. AV companies have gigantic worldwide networks of people ready to send them any new virus that comes along. (Sysadmins everywhere, like me, watching what's coming into their systems.)
This is the only thing that PC viruses have in their favor. Well, that, and the astonishing, superhuman inability of Windows users to EVER $@&#^$ LEARN that clicky-clicking on every damned attachment that comes their way (no PC Mail program ever does that automatically anymore) is a path for trouble.
Moreover, once a virus infects a Mac, it will need superuser access to do it's deeds; I would hope that even the dumbest of Mac users are smart enough to realize that "Hot Naked Britney.avi" won't need your password to play.
OS X *CAN* be attacked, but it's damned unlikely to come via a virus.
Trust me people are just WAITING for a Mac virus to appear, if only so they can crow "I told you so!" so one is not going to have more than a few hours in the wild before it's widespread knowledge.
This leaves trojans disseminated via normal filesharing means, via download or CD, like the Autostart Worm. Absolutely NOTHING has ever prevented such a program...so we're left to wonder why it hasn't.
Because the 1334 [EMAIL PROTECTED] doing the viruses these days are locked, like much of the corporate world, into MS solutions*.
E-mail viruses are written largely for one reason today: To produce a pool of usable zombies to sell for disseminating spam, for conducting DDOS attacks and suchlike. You cannot cram a cross-platform virus into the few bytes they have available for these things, and the pool of susceptible Macs is too small and diluted to infect long enough to be of any use.
They're aiming for the vast swaths of consumer systems on broadband in the US and Korea running wide open Windows systems. This is how, for example, that Comcast.com ranks as the worlds largest source of spam...not because they are harboring spammers, but because they've got a huge number of people on their networks with infected and vulnerable computers.
When Macs start comprising a large percentage of the computing environment then there will be time to worry. While we're less than 20-30%, fuggeddaboutit.
*Locked in more ways than one. A NY Times Magazine article earlier this summer was a peek into the virus kiddie culture. Their favored tool? MS Visual Basic. I kid you not.
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