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Large Prize Offered For Writing Mac Virus
Mordant writes "Some experienced Mac developers are offering a $25K prize to the first person to successfully infect two 'naked' Internet-connected Macs running stock Apple software. The best part is that if any Symantec employee succeeds in infecting the Macs, the prize goes up to $50K (Symantec has been fanning the flames of totally bogus "Macs aren't more secure, it's just that Windows is a bigger target" technical-equivalence propaganda)!" Update: 03/26 20:24 GMT by Z : Well, that was quick. Jack Campbell has cancelled the contest, after he "...was contacted by a large number of Mac users, and Mac software professionals who shared their thinking with me about the contest."
It is no BS, I connected my computer (XP SP2 I think, or maybe before it was released) directly to the Internet for a while. Some mysterious spam icons appeared on the desktop in less than an hour.
Of course there are no viruses for OS X. The thing is practically unusable.
/etc/hosts don't do anything, and neither does /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow either.
I decided in the interest of fairness I'd buy an Xserve for work.
So I got the thing in and set about setting the IP address (now this is a server so it's headless).
48 hours later we give up and start googling for a manual after we determine beyond the shadow of a doubt that ifconfig and
Finally, we figure out that we need to use 'serversetup' to do this (of course you do, this IS Unix after all) and to manipulate users we need to use 'nicl' or something like that.
So we decide, why not just load SuSE on this and forget this OS X crap? So we google around some more trying to find out how to boot from cdrom, which for some reason doesn't "just work". All we find is instructions for how to tell it to do this from a GUI, but like I said before this is headless and we're certainly not going to throw more good money after bad.
At this point we decide we'll just use this top of the line Xserve as an internal FTP repository, Apple couldn't have screwed that up. Well, they did. Setting a user's home directory and making the FTP server actually use it is a project that takes all afternoon.
All in all, they probably are as secure as obscurity can make something. I've worked on pretty much every UNIX out there and can tell you, this is the very worst, if you can even call it UNIX. Apple should have stuck with A/UX.
Dan