Mac's Immunity To Recent Virus Attacks

bluepinstripe writes " An article over at MacCentral references two articles about the Mac's immunity to the recent virus attacks." This is nothing new, but worthy of note, from time to time, such as now.

Comments

but they still suffer....

[Anonymous Coward]

they still have to worry about the excess traffic generated.

my own company's mail server (which has an AV on it to check attachments) got the equivalent of a DDoS because of all the people who have us in their address books.

we ourselves did not get infected, but our mail server sure was (is still) sluggish.

Re:How many for Linux?

[jonadab]

> If you count worms that exploit only Linux, that have made it
> very far in the wild, you could probably count them on one hand.

OTOH, if you count worms that exploit unix-like systems in general,
you'll get a somewhat larger number. There have been quite a few
worms over the years that spread through unix-based software such
as sendmail. Naturally, most of them won't work on current versions.

Then again, that 50 number for Mac systems is low if you count
historical viruses that would no longer work on modern Mac systems.
Back in the day when all Macs still sported floppy drives and ran
a single-user out of the box, there were quite a large number of
Mac file viruses.

So if you only count malcode that's in the wild and will work
on current versions... there aren't many, except for Windows.

Local news said it at my prompting.

[Anonymous Freak]

I run a small on-site computer consulting company, and a local station (KOIN-6 in Portland) called to ask if they could come along on a service call to remove the worm, and film it (with the client's permission, of course.) So I found a client willing to do it, and met the news people there.

As part of the (short) interview, they asked how to avoid it, and I mentioned that Macintoshes and Linux machines were immune. That made it on the news. (Along with very little else of my interview.)