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Why DOESN'T someone make a virus for mac?

ksgant said:
I read somewhere not to long ago that hacking and cracking are not like it used to be. Hackers today aren't really looking for the "challenge" or bragging rights. They're looking to make a buck more than anything else. Setting up shadow servers that email spam everywhere or keyloggers to steal credit-card numbers and passwords. So naturally they go after the biggest group with computers.

It seems gone are the days of the people that just want to put up funny messages on your computer or destroy data for no reason. I'm sure there are some still out there, but they're just not targeting the Mac....yet.
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quite true and also the number of true computer virus made now is a very very small number. I believe it is around 2%. Most of the stuff is worms an Trojans.

Now why the number of "virus" seems so high is because Worms and Trojans are commonly referred to as "virus" but by definition they are not "virus" and most of those are there going after money and quite frankly there is just no money in infection OSX compared to windows.

Now OSX in large just as defenseless to Trojans as windows and that is because Trojan relay on user stupidity and error and there is only so much an OS can do to protect against that because a Trojan will get authorization to install on OSX because it relay on the person opening the fall and installing it. That means it would be given that password. Now I be their are still a lot of protections built into OSX to help reduce it but still user stupidity is and always will be the biggest weaknesses in an OS security.
 
I have worked for Symantec for a number of years now and infact their are
virus's for the mac they are just very easy to get rid of and since you can rebuild a mac OS instead of having to nuke & pave like a PC virus's for a mac are just not worth doing. but to give you a perspective on how many virus's are out their for macs in the office that I worked in we had almost 600 employee's doing virus removal each one with their own station. their where 2 mac stations and not even 1 person permanently assigned to them if you where lucky enough to be trained in mac virus removal if you got the call you would transfer it to the 4th floor and have a 5 minute virus removal

Rodimus Prime said:
quite true and also the number of true computer virus made now is a very very small number. I believe it is around 2%. Most of the stuff is worms an Trojans.

Now why the number of "virus" seems so high is because Worms and Trojans are commonly referred to as "virus" but by definition they are not "virus" and most of those are there going after money and quite frankly there is just no money in infection OSX compared to windows.

Now OSX in large just as defenseless to Trojans as windows and that is because Trojan relay on user stupidity and error and there is only so much an OS can do to protect against that because a Trojan will get authorization to install on OSX because it relay on the person opening the fall and installing it. That means it would be given that password. Now I be their are still a lot of protections built into OSX to help reduce it but still user stupidity is and always will be the biggest weaknesses in an OS security.
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Semi true but not even close to a 1/100 of the trojan files out their need to be opened by a user to infect the system. I don't know about macs witch I think is what you are referring to but in windows if you get a trojan on your system 99% of the time they will self extract and let loose what ever programs and virus adware spyware and keyloggers etc... that they have had stored in them.
 
From what I've heard around the net, it's nearly impossible to get a self-propogating file to run on a mac unnoticed. So a real "virus" probably won't appear for a long while. :cool:

Rodimus Prime said:
…snip…but still user stupidity is and always will be the biggest weaknesses in an OS security.
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That's where the ultra cool Security Assistant in Vista comes in to help you make those important decisions in an informed way. :p :D
 
I remember reading a while ago that there are five major ports as to where a virus comes from....all five are open with windows, all five closed with a Mac.

Nobody seems to remember the Mac OS 9 virus. One was made towards EOL, but Apple provided patches in a heartbeat.
 
Mozze said:
I have worked for Symantec for a number of years now and infact their are
virus's for the mac they are just very easy to get rid of and since you can rebuild a mac OS instead of having to nuke & pave like a PC virus's for a mac are just not worth doing. but to give you a perspective on how many virus's are out their for macs in the office that I worked in we had almost 600 employee's doing virus removal each one with their own station. their where 2 mac stations and not even 1 person permanently assigned to them if you where lucky enough to be trained in mac virus removal if you got the call you would transfer it to the 4th floor and have a 5 minute virus removal
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Can you like, identify a few of the very numerous viruses that, in fact, exist for Mac OS X please?
 
iMacZealot said:
Nobody seems to remember the Mac OS 9 virus.
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There were several. For other Mac OSes as well. But none for OS X. Kinda destroys that whole "marketshare" thing, because it was lower then. The installed user base for Macs with OS X is far higher now, and the first person who could really write one to shut us smug Mac users up would be famous. It should be easy since most of us don't even run any antivirus or protection.

Wake when that actually happens.
 
The way permissions are setup in OSX help stop some of the lesser viruses that some hackers put together for Windows computers. It takes a bit more work to create a Mac virus that you can convince someone to allow to run on their system, and perhaps hackers just aren't as interested in putting in the effort.
 
dpaanlka said:
Can you like, identify a few of the very numerous viruses that, in fact, exist for Mac OS X please?
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I honestly cannot because my department was shutdown I think about the time of the release of OSX and I had personally taken less than 5 mac virus removal calls and I can tell you in all of the calls it was as easy as locating the file and pushing delete for it to go away.

Just to add to this whole thing in the department of Virus's I have not seen anything major in the last 2 years in the development of virus's it seems to me that hackers have been hired by companies to write adware for them as that seems to be way more common than anything else. the last really hardcore virus I have seen was magistor but that was years ago. I would say as long as you have a firewall and a decent anti-virus program ( not bloatware like norton or mcafee something simply like AVG or PANDA or if your lucky enough to get a copy symantec anti-virus) you'll be safe
 
nplima said:
The best (or the least damaging option) is to install XP while cut off from the internet, use that super user to setup everything you need (replacing Outlook and IE being 2 essential steps), then demote the original user account to run unprivileged. From then on, you only use the Administrator account when you really have to.
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The big problem is that many windows programs require you to run as admin so that would just be a pain.
 
GFLPraxis said:
There was one made by an antivirus company that was never released.

There was also one that was released. You had to be an idiot, download and execute it, and then type in your username and password to install it. It also could not spread easily and Apple patched the vulnerability and the site hosting it went down; it had disappeared from the internet within the week.
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There was a joke "email-virus" a few years ago which would have worked for Mac users as well. An email with the following text:

"Dear recipient. I always wanted to create a virus, but I'm too stupid for that. So I created this email virus which requires your cooperation. Please delete all files on your harddisk, then mail this virus to everyone in your address book. Thank you for your help. "
 
1. effort/profit ratio is too low, 5% market share is not good enough
2. Unix system is generally more restricted,
 
Mozze said:
I honestly cannot because my department was shutdown I think about the time of the release of OSX and I had personally taken less than 5 mac virus removal calls and I can tell you in all of the calls it was as easy as locating the file and pushing delete for it to go away.
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Well, yeah, nobody doubts there were Mac OS classic viruses. However there are NO Mac OS X viruses.
 
Rodimus Prime said:
Now OSX in large just as defenseless to Trojans as windows and that is because Trojan relay on user stupidity and error and there is only so much an OS can do to protect against that because a Trojan will get authorization to install on OSX because it relay on the person opening the fall and installing it. That means it would be given that password. Now I be their are still a lot of protections built into OSX to help reduce it but still user stupidity is and always will be the biggest weaknesses in an OS security.
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I have to take issue with this - existing trojans have tended to be very crude, obvious and easily recognised. (E.g. leaked version of Office 2008, size 100K) But there's no reason why a more sophisticated, subtle trojan couldn't fool even the most careful, experienced Mac user.

Have you installed 3rd party software on your Mac? If so, who's to say you haven't run a trojan? How would you know if you had?
 
GFLPraxis said:
There was one made by an antivirus company that was never released.

There was also one that was released. You had to be an idiot, download and execute it, and then type in your username and password to install it. It also could not spread easily and Apple patched the vulnerability and the site hosting it went down; it had disappeared from the internet within the week.
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Those are called prof of concept all they do is write down the peramitors on paper and prove that a virus can be written for something lager anti-virus corporations will do this on a daily basis, get a hold of the OS maker and let them know about it.

Here is a small list of threats for Mac OSX

http://www.symantec.com/security_response/vulnerability.jsp?bid=16736

http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2006-060110-4631-99&tabid=2

http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2006-112210-2925-99&tabid=2

http://www.symantec.com/en/us/security_response/vulnerability.jsp?bid=12238

http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/security_response/vulnerability.jsp?bid=16736

Should Listen to this Pod cast.
http://www.symantec.com/about/news/podcasts/detail.jsp?podid=sr_OSX
 
Probably the reason Macs don't have a lot of virus's

Think about this, to make a virus for windows, you'd need two things really:
Microsoft Visual Studio Express
Internet to youtube and virus tutorials

For Mac, you would need something to make virus for them, I doubt there are a lot of "Mac Virus" tutorials, and you would have to spend a great deal of time learning about the system yourself because macs are unix and therefore are more stable and harder to crack.

I am still a proud PC user and side note:

XP FTW
 
UNIX is hard to crack, that's why. The whole "they don't have enough marketshare" argument is BS. As has been stated, there are millions of Macs with no anti-virus at all, if it was so easy it would have been done.

nichos said:
On windows, everyone is a "super user." (Although that's a bit different in vista).
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Yeah, coz on Vista, you have a nice shiny "allow" button before you get infected. Provides no real protection at a technical level at all, just a UI trick for marketing.

At least when someone is infected on Vista, Microsoft can say "you can't say we didn't tell you so, it was your choice to hit allow!" :p

No, to my knowledge, there are no complications in writing a virus to destroy your home folder (correct me if im wrong).
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To do that, the program would need access to your filesystem, so I think you are wrong. And even if you're not, you would still need to install the program yourself for it to do anything.
 
G5Unit said:
I've been thinking this through. There are tens of millions of mac users out there, why no produce a virus that infects them? People say that it's not worth it because we only have about 6.5 percent market-share. But really, if a hacker could infect HALF of that, I'm sure the hacker would be very proud. And c'mon, the person who creates the first mac virus would be ridiculously famous. So why not?
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You over-estimate the amount of Mac users.

And then you also only think about the skript-kiddies. The really dangerous malware authors and criminal hackers are in this business for the money - not for the fame. They don't want to get caught. And they don't want you to notice that you have a virus or a trojan or a backhole on your system. They want to take advantage of your computer without you noticing it.

And then we're already talking about a different target audience for such malware: Corporate computers. Things that are in a big network with fast Internet connections and maybe even interesting data on them -- in case you don't just want to use the machines as a bot net to distribute viagra spam emails.

More than 900 million computers on this planet are PCs running Microsoft operating systems (and that is a fact). Why should anyone in his or her right mind focus on a niche platform when more than 90% of the market are running something else? It just doesn't make any sense from a business perspective - and as I've already said, producing malware is a criminal business, not just a hobby for skript kiddies with a dangerous inferiority complex.
 
solvs said:
Generally, but aren't there Linux viruses?
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Tons of Linux servers have been hacked into. E.g.: a quick search yields:

http://www.infoworld.com/t/platforms/debian-project-servers-hacked-659
http://www.itpro.co.uk/605688/red-hat-breached-as-hackers-target-linux-servers
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/04/1070351697278.html

There are even botnets of Linux machines, apparently:

http://blogs.computerworld.com/14723/no_more_linux_security_bragging_botnet_discovery_worry

I realize that hacking isn't the same as infected via a virus. But viruses are
out of fashion these days. The point is that machines with a unix-like security
model are not invulnerable.
 
All operating systems have security holes, including unix operating systems. If a hacker really wants in, they will find a way. The reason why we don't get to experience the pleasure of having to worry about viruses/malware/etc is because of market share. Specifically, I mean market share in the corporate world. Until the day comes where macs gain a significant market share, especially in the corporate world, we can all keep on pretending that our Macs are "secure". This is exactly the reason why I hope Macs never become the dominant platform in the business world.

Why should anyone in his or her right mind focus on a niche platform when more than 90% of the market are running something else? It just doesn't make any sense from a business perspective - and as I've already said, producing malware is a criminal business, not just a hobby for skript kiddies with a dangerous inferiority complex.
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exactly
 
I wonder if the Anti-Virus companies would create a virus for Macs so we had to get an Anti-Virus programs for our Macs....

Just a thought.
 
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