Mac Virus

mortals · 1 Nov 2006 at 18:48

All you need to do is search this part of the forum for virus.

Virus protection and macs ... should I bother?
101 reasons why OS X is better than Windows

I'm not saying any thing other than, there are (auto non-user installing) mac viruses out there.

They aren't anywhere near as big as windows viruses tho

I don't run any antivirus on my mac

I do think tho as punky_munky said it is just a matter of time before something comes out. Possibly a rootkit of somekind :confused:

Una · 1 Nov 2006 at 19:13

There are macos rootkits out there already. osxrk, Togroot and WeaponX are a few. WeaponX is pretty decent.

D.P. · 2 Nov 2006 at 08:28

BillytheImpaler said:
Perhaps there will be more malware, bad software that unwitting users install themselves, but it's unlikely that the OS will be compromised in any way like NT has been compromised in recent years.

Thats a little foolish, to be lulled into such a false sense of security. OSX is just as vulnerable as any otrher OS out there really.

AJUK · 2 Nov 2006 at 08:39

D.P. said:
Thats a little foolish, to be lulled into such a false sense of security. OSX is just as vulnerable as any otrher OS out there really.

No it's not. It isn't immune, as no OS is, but OS X is just about as secure as an OS can get because of the way it works.

growse · 2 Nov 2006 at 15:13

AJUK said:
No it's not. It isn't immune, as no OS is, but OS X is just about as secure as an OS can get because of the way it works.

How is 'the way it works' different from the way BSD works? It is basically just a tweaked FreeBSD with a nice GUI (taken from http://www.apple.com/macosx/overview/advancedtechnology.html) - a good combination for a consumer OS, I'd agree, but lets not get ahead of ourselves. Because it's basically FreeBSD underneath, how is it any more secure than FreeBSD itself, or an OS that's regarded as more secure than FreeBSD, OpenBSD?

Rich43 · 3 Nov 2006 at 20:19

Never used a mac but I believe mac and linux run everything in user-mode and not as a administrator. So basically, if you get a virus that tries to erase the contents of your hard drive, it would not have the permissions to do it... unless you ran it as root.

yoda · 6 Nov 2006 at 09:11

JonRohan said:
haha

Glad you like that one JonRohan, I'm allmost at the point of dumping ms windows as my main OS....
Unfortunatly, I need dreamweaver.... and games.... I'm hoping WINE might help...