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Question about viruses and apple

R

Raiden

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 14, 2002
147
0
I got a question,

if apple gains more popularity, and more and more people start switching to the mac, will the mac be more exposed to viruses and hacks just like windows? Everyone says windows has so many viruses, and security holes, and needs patches and stuff. Will the same thing happen to macosx if it goes into the mainstream? Or is it way more stable than windows?

I just dont understand, thanks!
 
I had the same feeling about this too, if more and more people are using Macs I guess we are expose to more dangers like the wintel machines. I mean some emails that I get are relatively harmless since my mac cant identify whet file types they are or not being able to read .exe files. I am wondering too...
 
Up until a couple of years ago (2000?), there were 38 native viruses; the latest I've seen is 4 more since Mac OS X came to exist. (Macintosh was still at 12 percent market share in 1997.) There are thousands of Microsoft Office viruses, many of which can affect the Macintosh version of MS Office.

It's possible that a few of the virus writers, will get a Macintosh but they seem to be mostly DOS types who would never give it DOS and only use Windows because they have to use it.

There will be more viruses in the future, as Mac OS X becomes more popular, especially if the price of the hardware is more reasonable but it's unlikely to reach the epidemic proportions that it has on DOS/Windows. If you've looked at Windows virus definition downloads, you'll see that there are probably around 500 new definitions per month. The only way that will happen is if the Macintosh platform has 95+ percent market share.
 
Its not the people we have to worry about.
Only if codders/script kiddies learn how to create a virus on mac.

Sure if OS X gets popular enough it is possible, but besides for people not being able to code people also have better security on any *nix, such as Os X. There may be virus's but there will be less total system faliures or your system bein taken over.
 
Given enough time, we'll be attacked. Just keep faith in Apple continuing to develop an OS that is more secure than MS Windows. They are afflicted by poor coding just as much as they are by the number of virus writers.

Dan
 
applescript looks as tho it could be a potential hole for stuff like that to me, but then i know very very little about security side of stuff
 
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