Question: It’s been a while since I’ve owned a laptop, especially a MacBook Pro. FortuntEly, a recently reconciled-with best friend of line had an extra mid 2012 (still upgradeable) MBP that he sold to me for hella cheap, and I used to have one when they were new. However, when I remember owning it before, part of the allure to MacBook’s/Linux-based operating systems was that it was nearly impossible for them to get viruses, yet here I am in 2021, re-installing macOS Catalina because of a Trojan virus I must’ve torrented. (I know I can blame the torrent, but when I did the same things back in 2012 I never got viruses)?
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Trojan Viruses on MBP??
- Thread starter davemp88
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There are no Mac viruses in the wild. If you are sure you got one (and not a false positive from an anti-virus app) from a torrent, it was a Windows virus, and has no ability to infect a Mac. Malware, on the other hand, is something that a Mac user does need to be careful of.
Ahem, I get a bit "where to start" when I read trojan and virus like that…
Essentially you're safe on the latest and greatest MacOS, unless you actually activate the bad code yourself; i.e. download and launch something yourself.
So if you just torrent media, and make sure the media is opened directly into the media player, and stick to somewhat reputable sites; then you're actually quite safe.
However… if you download software, or if you click on that "installer.dmg" that a site managed to sneakily get into your download folder; then of course you will be **** five ways from Sunday, with a ********* sideways, three small ***** (with the shell on), all while ***** of the **** in ****** low temperature, and the electric ****** ******* rigged to 240V. Which, as anyone can correctly assume, would be painful.
The Apple ecosystem isn't completely safe from 0day exploits, though; and as we've recently seen some have been going round live before Apple got aware of them. So it's always a good idea to stick to somewhat reputable sites, if you are intent on being down that particular rabbit hole.
Essentially you're safe on the latest and greatest MacOS, unless you actually activate the bad code yourself; i.e. download and launch something yourself.
So if you just torrent media, and make sure the media is opened directly into the media player, and stick to somewhat reputable sites; then you're actually quite safe.
However… if you download software, or if you click on that "installer.dmg" that a site managed to sneakily get into your download folder; then of course you will be **** five ways from Sunday, with a ********* sideways, three small ***** (with the shell on), all while ***** of the **** in ****** low temperature, and the electric ****** ******* rigged to 240V. Which, as anyone can correctly assume, would be painful.
The Apple ecosystem isn't completely safe from 0day exploits, though; and as we've recently seen some have been going round live before Apple got aware of them. So it's always a good idea to stick to somewhat reputable sites, if you are intent on being down that particular rabbit hole.