LuKreme wrote:
On 11-Nov-2009, at 18:34, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
I will point out that MacOS 7, os* & os9 were HIGHLY virus-prone,
yet there were far fewer of them than OSX today.
Er… that is simply not true. Not in anyway.
As I recall, there were a total of 31 viruses for System 7 and one CD-ROM worm
for System 8/9 (Autostart Worm).
It IS true. Obviously you were one of the lucky younger folks who
never had to do much admining of Macs. I've admined networks with
Macs on them since the Mac Toaster came out.
Symantec Antivirus for MacOS (pre-OSX) when it was still available was
up to several hundred for MacOS Classic. Heck, one of the first
Apple viruses was Leap-A - it infected Apple IIs back in 1982.
Trust me, I used to work at Symantec - they NEVER sell a product that
they can't make money on, not for long, anyways. If Mac Classic was
as virus resistant as you think it was, Symantec would have never
got into that market.
MacOS Classic was particularly bad since so many of them were in
classroom lab environments - when 1 got a virus, they all would
since apple filesharing considered everything on the Appletalk network
a trusted system.
Keep in mind of course that few Mac Classic systems were on the Internet
past 2003. Classic's Internet days didn't last much more than 5-6
years, the most common vector for MacOS Classic system viruses to
spread was infected files shared on floppies or downloaded from BBS
systems.
Everything changed when MacOS X came. Last year, Macworld found a
grand total of 49 infected MacOS X systems - yep, that's 49 in
the entire history of MacOSX. But, don't get too puffed up about it,
the winner of the Zero Day Mac cracking contest has repeatedly warned
that there are more than enough Macs out there for a Mac bot to be
self-sustaining.
And, I still think there's only been less than 10 Linux viruses, all of
them laboratory curiosities only.
Ted
