First Viruses on Macs with OS X???

[Kyle]

http://edition.cnn.com/2006/TECH/04/....ap/index.html

He and at least one other person who clicked on the links were infected by what security experts call the first virus for Mac OS X, the operating system that has shipped with every Mac sold since 2001 and has survived virtually unscathed from the onslaught of malware unleashed on the Internet in recent years.

[rolin]

Well - as always (and even on Win machines) not the OS,
but the user is the problem.

There is NO operating system,
that gives you 100% protection.

Especially when you click every f*****g link or
image about unreleased OSes (MAC porn) or
anything else unknown.

But - it's simply a fact,
that in this moment Windows is
the most insecure OS you can imagine.

I know, because I work on Windows and Mac OS (preferably) -
and I never had problems with viruses on any of them,
because of my attentive behaviour in the WWW.

But I've seen Windows machines with over
200 Viruses at once.
E.g. the PC of my parents..
..now they have a Mac mini and
never had any problems with vermin again.

And this is no sensation mongering -
this is just fact again.

[elbows]

One reason Macs have been safer over the years is that their market share was low. So the vast majority of hackers, virus writers, criminal adbot evildoers etc, havent known the mac platform and anyway the vast majority of potential target victim machines are windows based.

If Mac market share climbs significantly, or if getting OSX running on x86 hardware increases the use/knowlege of OSX in the evildoer community, then there will be more security threats that target osx in future.

[makemassair]

yea i ported over from pc to mac recently tried to find a mac alternative to avg free anti virus.

couldn't find one then upon asking my mac obsessed lecturer, he said there weren't any.

what about spyware? can that still work on osx?

[videoteque]

If Mac market share climbs significantly, or if getting OSX running on x86 hardware increases the use/knowlege of OSX in the evildoer community, then there will be more security threats that target osx in future.

That was my idea too. But it is impossible. There are thousands of PC virus and just once every six months there's some talk about a Mac virus.

I think Apple pays some serious money to the virus makers (I think the ones who sell anti-virus!) so they don't produce Mac shit.

[sleepytom]

i think the major factor in the virus war is that people don't want to make viruses that would attack freeBSD or linux - it actually quite hard to make an osx virus that would not be capable of attacking BSD. I recon that most of the serious virus makers are very proactive in the opensource movement and see killing windows as a direct way of promoting the *nix systems. I suspect any osx virus to be directly attributed to norton who seem to be the only big AV company trying to get into the mac market.