Your comment reminded me of a Mac OS X developer's
"anti-piracy" technique. I realize that this doesn't cover the point you were making, and it doesn't cover the traditional definition of malware, but I was reminded of it regardless.
I remember that dev...I think more than one dev with more than one program did something like move the /Users folder into the trash to be deleted on a shutdown or something dumb. He didn't really think it through - something so preposterous...what happens if a legit user got his key stolen...etc.
However, again, I'm just saying given the number of apps that ask for admin passwords, what's so hard about using that password to do a "sudo rm -rf /" without having the user suspect anything wrong with the application (until, of course, the computer reboots and then fails to start up...)?
Nothing really; the mac community would target the virus source before it could spread to others.
That sort of reeks of naïvete. I know a fair number of Mac users who wouldn't know much, and a huge number that think obscurity is security (cause of Apple's small market share) or it's just inherently more secure than Windows, so bad things can't happen (um, but everything has holes...just because something's more secure doesn't mean it's bulletproof...).
Once some not-ridiculous non-proof-of-concept malware is out in the wild, the "mac community" wouldn't be able to deal with the issue before it spreads because there's nothing that says the mac community is any less/more knowledgeable than the windows community. arguably windows users tend to be a bit better about security, only because they have to deal with threats all the time. and that is infinitely better than the laid back approach many Mac users have towards malware because it just doesn't exist for OS X.
It would get a lot of hype in the media, but widespread damage would not happen. The Mac community is so closely knit that we would know about it very quickly. We would just alter our Internet habits & change a few settings to a more secure Mac.
I respectfully disagree. It may seem that we are more closely knit, but that is most likely not the case, and it is not going to matter whatsoever if the next completely dangerous malware to show up is a worm that requires no user input. Changing habits and settings will not do anything because people just won't do it. Old habits die hard, if at all. And not all grandmas and parents and other adults and teenagers and kids using Macs will even know about this threat.
New users would find out how to make their Macs more secure & others would make it secure only for a limited time until the threat has been neutralized then go back to their old ways.
Only with time, patches, and antimalware software will the threat become neutralized to the point that it won't be widespread, but that does not mean the threat will disappear.
Most anti virus companies give away a free removal tool for specific malware. I think it happened before with the previous piece of malware that hit the Mac community.
Most to date have been proofs of concept or jokes. As for the 0day exploits floating around for various Apple software already (anyone remember MOAB?)...some of them have yet to be fixed, even though it's been almost half a year since those..that's only MOAB, nevermind all the others around.
Also as someone stated above, Apple would issue a security update/fix.
And like I said, this is not only applicable to Apple software, but is applicable to any and all software you decide to use. Even with security updates, there is no guarantee people will update, and update in a timely manner. That's if Apple even releases a security update for the issue. They actually haven't done so for a lot of sploits I know of...
