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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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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.
It depends on if you count worms, and what you consider "part of the OS".
Lots of software run on Linux/BSD/other unix-like systems, so if a worm uses a flaw in that software, can you really call it a Linux problem?
It's not as clear cut as it is in the proprietary software world. where programs generally run on one platform only, and MS/Apple bundles tons of stuff tightly with the OS.
There have been a couple honest to goodness Linux viruses, but none that I know of have ever spread widely. 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.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Agreed. It just seems like people brag about something that is painfully obvious (Macs don't get affected by Outlook viruses; people who are vaccinated against polio don't get polio)
Again, agreed.
And this leads to another point. Why do we call them "Windows" viruses. It isn't a function of Windows, per se, that allows this to happen. It's a function of Outlook and OE that causes the problem. If mail.App ran binary attachments without a scan, Macs would be just as vulnerable as Windows machines.
We should start calling them Outlook viruses. Put the blame where it belongs, on the bad email applications.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
I don't get all these nasty comments about Macs. I don't actually own one, been a Linux user since 1994 and before that I was a SUNOS guy. Never really liked Macs but I could see that people found them easy to use so that was fine. OSX is by far the best of both worlds, my next laptop is almost certainly going to be a powerbook, doesn't mean I won't continue to like Linux, its all UNIX, its all good.
The one thing I find odd is the lie that is simplicity. Macs are a doddle to use and yet they are clearly also nice secure systems. Windows is less easy to use and yet easier to write viruses and trojans for. Chewbacca defense? It does not make sense! If Macs were as common as PCs they still wouldn't suffer the same level of viruses and worms as Windows does. Same is true for Linux. Besides which, what if we had 25% Windows, 25% Linux, 25% Macs and 25% others. I bet Windows would still have by far the greatest number of viruses etc.
Cool off guys. Macs are good. Its all UNIX and that is good. A little bit more of this and Windows will be the minority just as it should be.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Actually, we have fun at work with all the viruses and worms. I have my TiBook at home and don't really care about anything (obviously). Here at work I'm using Windows. Every time an email comes in, me or my officemate will read the subject name and who it's from and then try to guess what the contents are. "Generic Viagara" is a common one. Then if there's an attachment, try to guess if it's a .pif or .scr. You should try it. And then go home, hop on your Mac, and be productive again.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
> 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.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
From another article I read a week ago. The 50 was really for OS 9 and earlier. The old OS is a very insecure OS, with little interms of memory protection, and multi-user access levels, but was left alone given low usage levels.
OS X however inherites from BSD, so it also inherited all the fixes to past problems in BSD, which is mainly used as an Enterprise Unix solution. And also keep in mind it is a new operating system, version 10.2 has only been around for just over a year. That said, it does come with a more secure default configuration, with most services disabled by default, which is the weakness of most Unix and Linux systems, since they're usually deployed as servers and have most of their services on by default.
Mac OS X uses micro kernel technology. This provides better memory protection between applications, and the ability to sperate the OS into different components and levels. This becomes key when updating the OS. Most updates, since it does not involve the micro kernel, a complete system restart isn't necessary. The micro kernel will continue to run while the rest of the OS is patched in restarted, reducing start up time for kernel updates.
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.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
For both points, you are referring to problems that have to be opened up explicitly. By default, all those excellent remote user capabilities are turned off, and the one place that uses fb_realpath() (the FTP server) is off by default.
The situation on X is not as good as it was with, for example, 7.0, where getting anything remotely exploitable up demanded a multi-digit number of clues, but it is still many steps back from the default Windows situation. After all, who outside of Redmond is conscious of the fact that every Windows machine is running a DCOM RPC endpoint mapper?
True, but only to a point.
The earliest macro virus, concept (1995), ran rampant on both Macs and PCs (despite the fact that MS Office 4 for Mac was a Piece of Sh*t) before Office had macro detectors.
Since then, almost all macro viruses in Word and Excel documents create havoc only on Windows operating systems because the viruses make procedural and path calls that work only on Windows, such as going to a directory path on C: drive, or activating a function that requires the full Visual Basic or ActiveX functionality found in Windows but stunted or non-existant in the Mac version of Office.
The Mac version of Office screams bloody murder when it detects macros and warns the user. If a modern macro virus is let to run on a Mac OS system, it fails to run or runs only to a point.
A point that should be made throughout all this virus hoopla is that while Macintosh users are generally immune from any direct attack from PC viruses, a Macintosh user can be a "typhoid Mary" style carrier by passing along a virus from an email or infected file. Also, due the SOBIG virus and BLASTER, everyone, including Macs, suffer from the Internet slowdowns that affect the servers that manage it, as well as intranet slowdowns in businesses.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.