Apple Yanks Mac Virus Immunity Claims From Website

redletterdave writes "Apple quietly switched out a statement that claimed its Mac computers were completely immune to viruses with a less-forward statement: 'It's built to be safe.' The PR shift comes in the aftermath of the Flashback Trojan, which affected hundreds of thousands of Macs back in early April. From the article: 'Apple strives for perfection, but stating something is perfect when it isn't is ultimately bad for PR and company morale. Jobs used his reality distortion field to "rally the troops," so to speak, but "Mountain Lion" will ensure Apple can tout its closed, highly-secure operating system for the foreseeable future in a much more realistic sense. Just because a product isn't impervious to sickness doesn't mean it isn't "insanely great."'"

Comments

Suprising that no one has sued.

[allaunjsilverfox2]

I mean, that type of statement COULD be construed as false advertising? Or am I completely wrong?

Re:Suprising that no one has sued.

[SJHillman]

They were careful to say that Macs are immune to Windows viruses. It's sort of like saying that Ford cars are generally unaffected by Toyota's engineering flaws. Doesn't mean that they don't have any of their own.

Re:Suprising that no one has sued.

[Quiet_Desperation]

Still seems a fair comparison. Hey, folks, product X is plagued with such and such problem. Ours isn't. Come buy ours.

Re:Suprising that no one has sued.

[SJHillman]

It's saying that, but in such a way that it's strongly implying "we don't have that problem" when they actually do. What if Ford put out an advertisement saying "Are you afraid of your Toyota skidding off the road into a tree? Then come buy a Ford!"? Sure, if you're driving a Ford then your Toyota probably won't hit a tree... but your Ford still will.

Re:Suprising that no one has sued.

[YodasEvilTwin]

Imagining a situation in which the analogy isn't perfect is easy; it's an analogy. If it were exactly like the actual situation then it wouldn't be an analogy, it would just be us talking about the actual situation. The point is that Macs aren't immune to viruses. There are probably browser-delivered Java viruses containing code for both Mac and Windows (although undoubtedly few of them, possibly just proof of concept, etc.) so the claim that "Macs are immune to Windows viruses" is less than truthful as well.

Re:Suprising that no one has sued.

[mcgrew]

No, it is correct that Windows is the only OS that can get a virus (and I'm not sure they still can get them). The International Business Times is a terrible source of tech news; wtf does an MBA know about computers?

They show their ignorance when they state

Microsoft had its Schadenfreude moment in early April, when a Russian antivirus company discovered that hundreds of thousands of Macs were infected with a variant of the Flashback trojan horse, which reportedly was able to exploit several vulnerabilities in Java, allowing itself to install onto the user's browser without any intervention or action on the user's part.

They're confusing the Flashback Trojan with Trojan BackDoor.Flashback, which is a worm. Worms and trojans can and often do contain viruses (most of the boot sector viruses in the '80s and '90s were also trojans).

The wiki article on this worm says "The trojan, however, will only infect the user visiting the infected web page, meaning other users on the computer are not infected unless their user accounts have been infected separately. This is due to the UNIX security system". NOT a virus. It has to be able to self-replicate and spread by itself to be a virus.

Any computer can get a trojan, and Unix systems have been hit by worms (an example is the Morris worm that almost took down the internet back in the '90s).

Unix and its bretheren, like BSD, Linux, and Mac, were designed from the beginning to be for networked, multi-user machines. Windows was never designed from the ground up to be for network computers, and MS now pays the price. Apple was smart to move to a Unix-like system when internet access became normal.

I just "fixed" an old "virus-laden" Dell last week that ran so slowly it would barely boot. But there were no worms or viruses, just useless memory-eating toolbars (I consider these to be malware, they do nothing or very little for the user and eat your performance for corporations' sake). It runs like a top now.

Odd how Norton won't warn you about that kind of crap, which slows your computer down as badly as being on a botnet.

Re:Suprising that no one has sued.

[SJHillman]

The first OS X malware in the wild was in 2006 - a worm/trojan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_virus

As far as a true virus, in the sense that it infects a file and then replicates, is increasingly rare in Windows as well. In my experience, Trojans are by far the most common malware threat out there now - mostly because they rely on user stupidity/uneducation, which is something that is very difficult to patch.

Re:Suprising that no one has sued.

[hairyfeet]

I don't see how you could be, after all they made the statement to sell units and the statement is pretty blatantly false. The scarier part to me though is how many actually believed it. I mean I have sat here on this very forum and been gobsmacked as an otherwise perfectly sane individual would argue that since Flashback is a trojan it "didn't count" like a child on a playground demanding a do over.

In the end folks there is no such thing as a general purpose OS that doesn't get malware, period. Apple, Linux, Windows, ALL THREE have bugs and if one uses only the tiniest bit of logic you would know why, it is because Operating Systems are now some of the most complex software ever written, millions of lines of code designed to interact with a myriad of hardware, and that isn't even counting all the millions of lines of code for the third party software running on top. To expect any company or group to be able to build something THAT complex and not have a single error? I'm sorry but that is simply ridiculous,humans are simply incapable of that level of perfection. There is simply too many interactions going on and no one person can keep up with it all.

Re:Suprising that no one has sued.

[bitt3n]

It's sort of like saying that Ford cars are generally unaffected by Toyota's engineering flaws.

Then someone's Ford gets rear-ended by a runaway Toyota, and you end up with a class action suit against Ford for making such an outlandish claim.

Re:Suprising that no one has sued.

[jazman_777]

There's a car analogy for EVERY situation. Car analogies are like the cars you find in a junkyard, crushed.

How could they have gotten away with that claim?

[SailorSpork]

Apple viruses have been around for awhile. Linux viruses exist. Viruses exist even for obscure, closed computer systems (look at STUXNET). Statistically, were they less likely to get viruses because Apple's OS is on a lower percentage of the computers out there? Yes. Immune to all viruses? Laughable.

Still an impressive record

[Grayhand]

How many viruses are there for Windows? "Apple quietly switched out a statement "? What are they supposed to do have a press release? Would any company on the planet do that? Just because they got nailed by a virus doesn't make them worse than a PC. So many people are desperate for a chink in Apple's armor that they overreact to things like this. Put it into perspective. They are still very resistant to viruses. I have more legitimate issues like searching for files on a Mac is a joke and they aren't as stable as they used to be, especially since Lion came out.

Re:Still an impressive record

[Quiet_Desperation]

Because was gots ta hates on the Applez! GOTTA HATEZ! Kill! Kill! Hate! Faster LOLCat! Kill! (pant) (pant) (shakes fist)

Geek cred must be constantly watered by the dripping spittle of hate against a gadget company, and refusing to let others (The Sheep!) like what we don't like!

Re:Still an impressive record

[bky1701]

"Geek cred must be constantly watered by the dripping spittle of hate against a gadget company, and refusing to let others (The Sheep!) like what we don't like!"

Which is why half the comments here, and on the last story which will not be named, nearly all of them, were blindly defending Apple, no matter what?

Some of us are seriously worried about what would happen were Apple in Microsoft's position. Say what you will about Microsoft, they have never yet attempted the walled garden to the level Apple has made a business model and sold to billions of people with questionable claims. Speaking of which - pot, kettle, black, since most people complaining about Apple being attacked love to go and do the exact same thing they accuse others of when a story about Microsoft (and even Linux at times) comes up.

I'd personally prefer if neither company existed, but Microsoft is the incompetent demon I know, Apple is the devil I don't. They have already proven they are able to manipulate the market to absurd levels (iTunes, locked down mobile OSes and service lockin, increasingly walled off desktop OSes, etc) in ways that harm ALL computer users, not just Apple users. You can bet when Apple does something sneaky like quietly remove implications that they are immune to viruses I am going to pay attention. If that looks like irrational hatred like you claim it is, well, I think it says a lot about how objective you are to your "gadget company."

Here's the before and after

[Anubis IV]

Here are before and after images of the marketing text.

Also, contrary to the summary, it never claimed complete immunity to viruses, merely immunity to Windows viruses, which is, admittedly, a trivial and silly distinction to make, but I like playing the pedant.

Re:Here's the before and after

[Anubis IV]

Immediately after it, they expanded on the statement you quoted with, "A Mac isn't susceptible to the thousands of viruses plaguing Windows-based computers," which you apparently neglected to read.

Again though, as I said, I'm playing the pedant, since it's not much of a distinction.

Re:Here's the before and after

[jbolden]

I can explain it. It goes back to the very origin of the word "PC". PC was a term of IBM's computer based on the Intel 8088 (not a typo), which competed against the Apple II, Dec Rainbow, Commodore... It was an IBM brandname. Once the IBM Bios was cracked it got applied to IBM and the clone manufacturers who made "IBM compatible" or sometimes even "PC compatible" computers.

The fact that PC was an abbreviation for "Personal Computer" doesn't really matter in the context of thinking of it as a proper noun.

Closed?

[milbournosphere]

...its closed, highly-secure operating system...

Apple's OS is a lot of things, but it's still Unix based. If I want to do something, a terminal window is a click away. They've made the low level settings harder to get to via a settings window, to be sure; but at the end of the day, I can always issue the appropriate command. Closed might describe their mobile OS well, but that doesn't apply to their desktop OS (yet).

Re:Closed?

[Yvanhoe]

You know that "open" does not just mean "there is a CLI available", right ?

Re:"Windows viruses"

[lightknight]

Yes, and Windows is immune to Mac security bugs.

Re:Reality Distortion Field

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

The reality distortion field is what causes Apple fanboys to think that Apple invented the mouse.

Wow I've never actually heard this. I've never heard that Apple has invented the smartphone or the mp3 player, either. I sometimes think people think they heard the word 'invent' when the word used was 'innovate'.

Re:How could they have gotten away with that claim

[etresoft]

I think one of the reasons for the re-wording was to remove the word "viruses" since it so obviously confuses people who don't know the difference between viruses and trojans and think the handful of Mac malware in 12 years is equivalent to over 17,000,000 for Windows. Sorry, but market-share doesn't account for that discrepancy.

Progress

[onyxruby]

I consider this to significant progress on the part of Apple and they deserve to get credit. Much as Microsoft has their head buried in the sand for years before they started making changes, we should applaud Apple for taking the first step. I welcome Apple to world of reality, a world in which operating system have security flaws, require patches and get viruses.

Now that Apple is in at least some small way acknowledging the real world, let's see if they can clean up their act the way Microsoft did years ago. Admitting you have a problem is always the first step, now we can always hope that they will start to embrace industry standards for dealing with security issues. Perhaps someday their users will no longer also have their heads in the clouds about security issues?

Kind of funny thinking about it, a decade ago I never would have imagined citing Microsoft as a company that can be cited as cleaning up their act for security. /responsible for securing an environment that is %50 mac, so I'm not trolling.....

Re:Reality Distortion Field

[jo_ham]

The reality distortion field is what causes Apple fanboys to think that Apple invented the mouse.

No true Apple fan believes Apple invented the mouse. The story of Steve Jobs visiting PARC and exclaiming "you're sitting on a goldmine!" in exasperation when they said that they had no intention of commercialising it then rushing back to Apple and calling the hardware guy in and told him to drop all current projects because "*this* [the mouse] is what we've got to make".

I mean, if we're being truthful about what the RDF is.

It would be more accurate to say that it's the effect that gets people to cheer during the keynote when Jobs announced that they had updated iOS4 to enable the volume-up key to work as the shutter release in the camera app (and yes, that did happen. I eyerolled with amusement - I mean, it's a nice feature but it received a round of applause for goodness sake).

Re:Reality Distortion Field

[QuantumRiff]

Blame Al Gore, for innovating the Internet :)

Re:Reality Distortion Field

[bky1701]

Yeah, now you've got... this thing: http://www.apple.com/magicmouse/. No humor to be found there. That said, get your timeline straight: the one button mouse was discontinued as Apple's official mouse in 2007. Not 20 years ago.

I think you'll find most people who do not think highly of Apple here think just as little of Microsoft. I know it can be hard to get out of the mentality that it is Apple vs. Microsoft and you have to pick one, but there are, in fact, people who have legitimate reasons to dislike both the company you love and the company you hate.

Re:Yawn

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

What fool thinks that any computer system is immune to one sort of malware or another?

Linux zealots.

Couldn't be sued

[SilverJets]

Here is a link showing the before and after of the Apple web page in question.

http://sophosnews.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/mac-osx-before-after.jpg

I don't think they could be sued, there is no false advertising on their part. It blatantly states "A Mac isn't susceptible to the thousands of of viruses plaguing Windows-based computers."

That is a completely accurate statement. Mac OS X cannot be infected with a Windows virus.

Re:The first crack in the shell!

[vell0cet]

You joke... but this is actually the kind of thing that was lost with Steve Jobs. Not that OSX is impevious, but the almost religious belief in whatever Apple says.

Jobs would have kept saying it. Mac user would parrot it. You won't believe how often I hear Mac users (although I am one) delude themselves into thinking how great their platform is. The marketing speak of "Macs are immune to viruses" doesn't have to be true, the consumers just have to believe it is.

It's sort of like how Howard Camping said the world was going to end in May last year and then it didn't, and then people STILL believed him when he said it was going to end in October.

Re:The first crack in the shell!

[stewbacca]

The platform is great (or not) irrespective of what idiot fan boys think. This is what I hate most about any conversation about Apple ever. I too am a Mac user (think they are great) and accept that malware is not impossible to get. I, however, am not the stereotypical hyper-logical binary slashdotter who doesn't realize that marketing is marketing and exists to try to get people to buy your stuff.

Whether a bunch of fanboi hipsters buy Macs or not, I'm still going to like my Mac, regardless what others think. People who hate Macs, for whatever reason, think I am trying to tell them how awesome my Mac is (really don't care what you think), or even worse, that I'm trying to IMPRESS you by purchasing something anyone else can also buy. Again, I don't really care what you think about my computer. I'm using it a public space, because, a) I have it with me, and b) there's free wi-fi. Not c) to try and impress all the chicks with my Macbook...but this is slashdot, so maybe that's the logical conclusion.