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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.
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what the heck are you trying to say?
Speak English.
This is slashdot.org, run in America.
Us Canadians enjoy english.
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
> Macs are good. Its all UNIX and that is good.
Oh, so you'd run SCO's UnixWare without reservations then? After all, it's THE Unix now. Technology isn't everything, the ideology of the vendor matters, too. In that respect Apple is no better than Microsoft, they just have better designers.
A fair portion of out user base (I work for an ISP as a lowly Tech Rep.) is out of service because of the blaster virus (worm) adn its variants, obviously a Mac does not get infected by it, however, the people using a Mac are still getting slowdown related to the worm. Immunity is only defined by your weakest link.
> They have built a nice little browser that works well and
> uses a GPL rendering engine. They have improved it and released
> those improvements back under GPL.
Yes, but it's still a closed platform that they jealously guard. Anytime someone threatens to encroach on their turf (i.e. if they have a similar product of their own) with a better product, their lawyers jump into action. They are in full control of the price of entry into the Mac universe, from the OS to the hardware. They are actually worse than Microsoft in that it's a single source platform--you're completely at Apple's mercy regarding what hardware you run.
...and that's worth pointing out, too. The three viruses/worms of recent days are all W32 worms.
Microsoft's legacy older "home" operating systems (Windows 95 and 98) have, in practice, more security than the supposedly industrial-strength enterprise caliber NT-derived systems
There is no security in obscurity, but there is a definite measure of security in diversity. For national security reasons as well as economic reasons, we should not permit any OS to dominate the installed base.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
You can do a lot as a user on OS X without needing any administrator privileges. If a virus like SoBig.F were written for the Mac, and you clicked on it (or did whatever was required to run it), it would be able to trash your home directory and run programs. The only thing it couldn't do is write outside of your home directory. Some comfort, if all your files were there. At least some of them probably would be, your home dir includes things like your desktop, for instance.
Now if it wanted to modify the system in some way requiring administrator privileges, ie write access somewhere else, a dialog would come up and you would be required to type your password. Which you would probably do, if you were silly enough to run the virus in the first place. The weak point that these types of viruses are exploiting is not so much flaws in the systems as it is flaws in the user.
Therefore, Macs are not immune. They just haven't been targeted with this kind of thing yet. That is really nothing to gloat over.
I dont know much about them, but my father inlaw
seems to get a virus on his mac pretty much weekly. mostly when he ran os9, but still some even in his switch to osx.
As far as I know, all of them have come from emails, and mostly from his contacts out of country. But then again, he used outlook for his email. So it can be assured that if you have any MS products, its gona get toasted.
We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully "designed" to have come into existence by chance.