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Report That OS X Snow Leopard May Include Antivirus
File this firmly in the "rumor" category for now. the JoshMeister writes (in the third person) "Mac antivirus company Intego broke the story this morning that Apple is apparently including antivirus functionality in its upcoming operating system, Snow Leopard. But which antivirus engine is Apple using? Security researcher Joshua Long discusses the likely candidates."
My Apple is impervious! I don't need no stinkin' antivirus!
In their defense, doesn't the submitter get to choose where their name links to? Seems to me that we should all point and laugh at the submitter who thinks we all want to know what he is doing at all times.
>It's a trojan that only installs if you're stupid enough to download a program from a dodgy source
Err, thats pretty much the biggest vector for malware. Pick any popular app for Windows, go to pirate bay, download it, run it, and guess what? You have an infection.
Storm botnet was built by people double-clicking greetingcard.exe.
Dont underestimate people's abilities to go out of their way to find malware to run. You'll find tha you dont need to exploit any vulnerability other than ignorant on the user's part to root the machine.
Better to get a head start on the AV game now rather than later. If Apple's dream does in fact come true and the majority of desktop users switch to Macs, I'd expect to see a sruge of malware targeted for the Mac platform. Anyone that thinks Macs (or any other platform) is immune to malware is living one helluva naive pipe dream.
In that light, anti-virus software seems like a losing battle. I was going to suggest we build an OS for people to stupid to close their own mouths, but I think that's really missing the mark. That's just dealing with passive stupidity. Active stupidity is a much harder problem to tackle....
I don't understand why you people think that any OS can be imprevious to a trojan?
As an OS X user, this is great news.
This way I don't have to wonder if my Apple using friends are downloading Photoshop from TPB and getting infected.
But, no, as of yet, there are still no self-propagating viruses or worms for OS X.
Even though my snide Windows friends keep sending me the sky is falling emails every month about OS X being just as vulnerable as Windows.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
The "virus"mentioned in the screen shot isn't much of a virus. It's a trojan that only installs if you're stupid enough ...
I could put Ubuntu on a netbook and give it to my sister and she'd have no clue how to use it. But you can bet every last cent that if the source code to a virus was presented to her she would have it compiled (with all the right flags set to target her correct OSX version) and installed in a few minutes. It's borderline magic. Did you know they have LimeWire on Macs now? She managed to find that, install it and learn how to use it on her own but didn't have a clue as to how to move pictures from her old Windows machine to her MacBook. If only curing cancer compromised your computer, she'd have that done in a heart beat.
I knew she would be better off with a mac but your statement of "anybody who uses a Mac knows" makes me cringe. Bottom line: do not underestimate stupidity.
My work here is dung.
Apple has been light on details they have made public about Snow Leopard. We know they implemented a CDSA security architecture, expanded use of the sandboxing, and now there is this report of actual malware scanning, but the info on Apple.com is basically nonexistent. I surmise this is intentional. Security people either have developer accounts or will read up on this stuff in technical papers when NDA's expire next week. For regular users, Apple doesn't even want to bring up security as an issue. They will make blanket marketing statements about it, but they would rather leave all the details to more technical venues. This was their policy for Leopard too, with most users having no clue that a full port of TrustedBSD's mandatory access controls was included and being used to sandbox certain potentially vulnerable services.
There was a guy who was studying technical writing at my university. He uninstalled his anti-virus software because it was preventing him from installing some free software he wanted.
Apple needs to stop marketing itself as immune from viruses. They have never been immune, just not targeted and fortunately better built so that only a true idiot user with correct privileges can take down the whole system. Unfortunately their marketing that Macs are immune leads to user complacency and foolhardiness. The OS security is useless when the users circumvent or ignore it, which is what has happened with Mac malware, as well as a lot of newer Windows stuff. An idiot Mac user with admin privileges is just as dangerous as one in Vista or 7.
What they have largely been immune (not always) to is the worms and remote exploits for which Windows has been vulnerable.
I wouldn't put too much faith in "drag to install", because most malware doesn't actually need system privledges.
Also, reportedly websites have figured out how to make Safari automatically download this trojan and then launch the installer program. Users still need to enter their password, but having the dialog automatically popup makes the social engineering step that much easier.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Yet, the technical or sophisticated user tends to go with a Mac. Why is that? Don't believe me? Visit a developer's conference.
Problem with having a single, unified anti-virus (if ever such a thing is reliably possible), programmers will have an easier time guessing what protections they'll face when creating a virus.
Windows might not be the most... or... almost... close to the most stable series of operating systems, but there sure is a fair bit of variety involved in each installation. A vulnerability that can hit any generic OS X installation hard will be able to hit every other generic OS X installation hard.
This'll end in tears if Apple and friends don't keep vigilant on every threat. A problem with the die-hard proprietary and user friendly nature of Apple products is Apple are now the sole caretaker, the mother and father, the reason and the nonsense to every single computer they've made residency in. End users aren't encouraged to practice personal responsibility, they pay and trust... pay for trust...
Think Different, Indeed.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
really, it asked for the admin password?
But your point is true.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Though, to make up for it, they are likely to blame virtually any occurrence, from their ISP's technical issues to a full hard drive, on "viruses".
Have you seen the obscene amount of Mac shareware out there? Don't get me wrong a lot of stuff does "just work" on the Mac, but a lot of niches aren't filled, and it seems like while on Windows you're likely to find spyware infested free programs, and on Linux you're likely to find reputable OSS programs, on Mac you better be prepared to pay $20 a pop for all those little apps. Maybe I'm just being naive, but it doesn't seem like they'd all be around if some significant chunk of mac users weren't downloading and buying these programs.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I don't understand why you people think that any OS can be imprevious to a trojan?
Nobody with half a brain thinks that. The only way to make an OS totally proof against trojans is to stop users from installing new apps, and that's something that general desktop computing hasn't gone down the road of.
What's curious about OSX is that it doesn't have the sort of culture that leads to trojans being a problem. I'm not sure why this is; maybe it is because Mac users are more inclined to buy their software? (Indeed, they buy things that on other platforms would be free...) Accepting (apparently) legitimate payments is not a black hat sort of thing to do, because it is far too easy to trace back to a real identity.
I suppose it also helps that there aren't that many "usability of security" issues in the supplied OSX core apps, so users are less likely to do something catastrophic by accident.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
max isn't an OS that is osed as server. Linux is, hence the AV - you don't want your server distributing infected files to the poor windows boxes :P.
I knew she would be better off with a mac but your statement of "anybody who uses a Mac knows" makes me cringe. Bottom line: do not underestimate stupidity.
I wouldn't call it stupidity. Just because somebody isn't aware of all possible malware infection routes that doesn't make them stupid, naive is perhaps a better word for it or perhaps just unlucky. Expecting the average user to be aware of every possible way of getting his computer infected is about as realistic as expecting a non-medically educated person to be aware of all possible ways to get a disease. We all know any number of things we can do to avoid getting diseases, some of these behaviors are even hardwired into our DNA but they aren't 100% effective. How many of us are likely to go through life without ever catching a disease like, say, Influenza?
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
To be pedantic, that isn't an emergent behavior. Emergent behavior is many applications of a simple system, or simple rules, leads to complex behavior. For example, flocking.
Dont underestimate people's abilities to go out of their way to find malware to run. You'll find tha you dont need to exploit any vulnerability other than ignorant on the user's part to root the machine.
That's right. Five years ago, while speaking at a security conference, I offered a bet, that I would take a non-malicious but virus-pattern-matching program, call it "evil.exe" or something, put it up for download with a clearly worded webpage saying "this is malware, do not under any circumstances run it", and I'm sure if I could get the link on /. or something, thousands of people would run it.
Nobody took me up on that bet, everyone nodded in agreement.
Three years later, at the same conference, I told everyone that I've come to the conclusion it's not user stupidity. It's a problem of expectations. From the perspective of your average non-geek computer user, he's being told all the time how great the Internet is, and how easy it is to download and install stuff, and every trustworthy source gives him stuff to download - he really can't see much of a difference between nvidia.com and nudevirgins.com - and quite frankly, why should he? That's just a game of awareness vs. camouflage, another arms race.
But why does the computer give a random program full access to the machine? It shouldn't need it. 90% of available software could run in a sandbox, and communication with other software could go over well-defined APIs that are ACL aware at least, MAC at best.
But - we in the computer industry still believe in the "wiz kid" and the "hero programmer", not in processes and procedures, controls and quality assurance. It "limits our freedom".
We'll learn.
Probably the hard way.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
No problem. Just design a new OS from the ground up for the 21st century. In the 20th century things were slow enough without a sandbox.
Sounds like you haven't seen the Mac warez scene. There's heaps of warez, cracks, serials out there for Mac applications -- you can get them as readily as you can get Windows ones.
I do think it's true that Mac users are more likely to buy/pay for "shareware" apps though.
Offtopic, but "shareware" seems like the wrong word for it. Doesn't feel quite right.
Also, I dispute the notion that there's not much open source/freeware on Mac OS X. There is, but like a lot of open source stuff, they're often not the best-of-breed. I'd rather pay some money and get the best there is, like Transmit (for FTP) and CSSEdit/Espresso (for editing HTML and CSS).
The open source apps I use the most on OS X are Firefox and VLC.
Windows users must have a lot of disposable time if they wish to choose Dell's junkware.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good