new worm and viruses

[Cindy]

Do Mac's get very many viruses like the PC's seem to? Like this new worm... I have three friends who got it in their computers.
I have had Mac's now for about 7 years and have never had anything infect it (fingers crossed).
Just curious....
Cindy

 

[rainman::|:|]

There are a small handful of virii for Mac, I haven't seen one in like 10 years, my only infection was self-imposed to test antivirus softare. There's no need to worry, only the Windows world is so insecure. There are *nix virii, but not many, as it's very secure by nature...

pnw

 

[cb911]

yeah, no many virii for the Mac. i've never been worried about them ever since i got my Mac last year.

you should be more worried about hackers and crackers, there's probably more of a chance of that than getting a virus on your Mac.

 

[Cindy]

viruses

Originally posted by paulwhannel
There are a small handful of virii for Mac, I haven't seen one in like 10 years, my only infection was self-imposed to test antivirus softare. There's no need to worry, only the Windows world is so insecure. There are *nix virii, but not many, as it's very secure by nature...

pnw

I wasn't ever worried at all. My boss was just talking about the new worm yesterday and my co-worker asked if I was worried and I just told them that I didn't think Macs had the same problems as the PC'ers had.
They didn't believe me tho - since they don't like Macs - LOL (maybe they should).
Everyone I know (PC users) has had one virus or another and I never gave it any thought since I've never had any problems at all. LOVE this Mac!
Cindy

 

[MrMacMan]

Yeah I got a worm, but I knew it was coming I think my computer notified me that software was being installed on my machine by some unknown russian server...

Anyway it just really fliped white to black and made my screen dark and small, oh no, like it took me 10 seconds to fix...



pwned.

 

[mangoduck]

i dealt with sevendust recently, but on someone else's machine. found an app specifically written to deal with that virus, quick fix.

never had one on my own machine.

 

[idea_hamster]

I've often wondered...

Is it the relatively small percentage of the computing market that Apple has that actually protects Mac users?

I think there are two very different types of hackers: those who want to "break in and see what's inside" and those who want to create chaos, damage others' equipment, etc. Some want to destroy, others only want to prove that they're the computing equivalent of Houdini.

I think that this latest MSBlaster worm was targeted at MS users both for irony and for effect -- MS.com could probably survive a denial-of-service attack from a large percentage of the Mac community.

Until Macs are a larger portion of the computing community, I think that we won't present a rich enough target for the virus writers.

 

[alset]

7 years without a virus should answer your question. Just in case you are still wondering, no.... we rarely (and never since OS X, as far as I know) are attacked. The exception to the rule is the macro viruses that make their way into MS Word documents.

Dan

 

[alia]

I'm still using my four year old PC (yeah, I'm waiting for the new 15" powerbook), and I've only ONCE been infected, and it was like two weeks ago. I went to a web site that installed a trojan horse on my machine. Sometimes when you type a wrong URL, those spyware sites pop up and stuff like that. I've received hundreds of virii in e-mail over the years though, but I'm not dumb enough to open any of those attachments. I don't run Outlook on my home machine either, because a lot of the PC virii exploit it.

It's only constant vigilance that keeps PCs from getting infected. REALLY ANNOYING. I can't wait to have a mac again.

Alia

 

[SiliconAddict]

8 years using Windows and not a virus. Ever. The reason is good safety habits.

1. If I don't know the person who is e-mailing me and I don't know what the attachment is it's deleted.

2. Text e-mail only. If it isn’t plain text it gets trashed or I take the time to save the file as plan text to view it.

3. I don't use Internet Exploder.

4. I don't use MS LookOut.

5. AV defs always up to date.

6. A good firewall.

7. I play apply the weekly freaking MS patch. (God I hate these things.)

As has most likely been point out in the past the most popular platform is always targeted by virus writers. Windows is the main target because of this and because there are people that loath MS and want others to realize this the hard way. Did you guys know that:

I just want to say LOVE YOU SAN!!
billy gates why do you make this possible ? Stop making money and fix your software!!

is in the body of Blaster worm that is making its rounds right now?

There is no such thing as a OS that is impervious to viruses. Period. If Apple owned a 30% share of the OS market I'm quite sure we would see more viruses on the Mac.

However don't let this post make you guys think that I consider Windows to be more secure then OSX. I don't. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional. OSX is based on BSD which in turn is open source. I've gone over this with numerous coworkers. Who is go to be able to take care of the bugs in a OS faster? A closed platform who’s core OS can only be viewed by a finite number of programmers or an open source OS that’s available to anyone on the planet. I’m going to get a tad off topic here for a sec but I find it hilarious that some of my fellow Windows users use the stats that the number of bugs found in Windows is less then what has been found in Linux this year. Well of course they are less you idiots. MS employees are the only ones that can go through those 10 million lines of code vs. the world with Linux and BSD.

I suppose at the end of the day the reason why the Mac has less viruses is less important then the fact that they do.

 

[sosumi]

The only virus I ever had on a Mac was 15 years ago. I was copying games from a friend and found a diskette called "Fun Stuff". It turned out to be his virus collection... Think it was called nvirB or something.

 

[billyboy]

I would imagine it is just plain hard to write a virus for OSX else someone somewhere would have done it by now. People of that mindset dont care that there are only a few million Mac users so why bother. Linux gets viruses and like Apple they are a minority irritation to the Windows monopoly too. When people scratch cars for fun I am sure someone is out there as we speak trying to compile an OSX virus for kicks - they just arent that clever having cut their teeth on the perforated Windows systems.