Why is there no virus on the mac?

magick

magick

magick

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So I was wondering why there are no virus on the mac. I mean for a virus writer wanting cause lots of damage or make a name for himself the mac would be the perfect platform as no one has any anti-vrius protection.
 
It's a conspiracy.

There are AV programs for Mac, I think Symantec do one, but people don't develop viruses for Mac because doing it for Windows is easier due to more widely known exploits and a bigger potential 'market'.
 
destructive virus are rare now money is to be made with creating zombie computers, windows is the dominant OS so why bother with osx/linux.
we've seen with the pwn2own competitions osx isn't as secure as most people believe its just down to economics.
 
Because there are literally 0.0001 mac users on the planet because macs are so rubbish (and those users are poor hippies who aren't worth stealing from) and as such it's not worth the effort writing malware for the mac.


Well that was my opinion until I got my MacBook Pro 3 years ago :D.

TBH I'm not sure why really, though the argument of a smaller 'market' does stand true..
 
I was only talking about this on Friday. Despite the minority computers it would affect, surely the fact that no one seems to use AV software at all would render it at least *slightly* profitable?! Obviously not - and thank god!!
 
It is curious, the kudos a 'first mac virus' would get would probably be worth it on it's own for quite a number of people (especially given the nature of the mac/pc debate).

I suspect it is at least partly because of security, OSX is (like any unix derivative) fairly difficult to write a traditional PC style virus for (various demos aside, targeting one computer is easy, creating a virus which will self propagate much harder).
 
Burnsy2023 said:
because doing it for Windows is easier due to more widely known exploits
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As I understand it Windows 7 is actually better protected against exploits than OS X. Apparently Apple has a habit of forking projects from the public domain and not keeping them up to date. IIRC one of the Pwn2Own exploits was found by simply reading the changelog of the open source PCRE software. The PCRE maintainers fixed the bug a year earlier, Apple didn't bother.
 
THERE ARE VIRUSES FOR MAC AND WINDOWS.

MACS - LESS VIRUSES

MORE WINDOWS - MORE VIRUSES

SIMPLE.

Unless you actually work in IT you probably wont see many viruses on your home machine due to Virus protection and sensible browsing but as I support 2500+ machines you quickly realise they are still a problem.... Mac or Windows
 
There's no need to shout like that, especially when you're incorrect. There are one or two badly crafted Trojans kicking about for the Mac but a Trojan isn't a virus, there's a big difference. There are no actual viruses for the Mac in the wild.
 
OS X doesn't leave a million ports open for one thing. I'm not sure if Windows does these days, but it used to be terrible for it.
 
magick said:
So I was wondering why there are no virus on the mac.
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Because there are insufficient hosts.

You can't effectively spread a virus which attacks macs when the vast majority of the computers used run windows.

To spread a worthwhile virus which attacks macs it would have to go through windows computers as well... and then we are back to why windows is the one which gets lots of viruses and has so much AV protection.
 
There's no need to shout like that, especially when you're incorrect. There are one or two badly crafted Trojans kicking about for the Mac but a Trojan isn't a virus, there's a big difference. There are no actual viruses for the Mac in the wild.
Click to expand...

Sorry to shout but i'm not incorrect.

The question was Why is there no virus on the mac?

The answer is there are, just not many.
 
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Not many people with the skills to make a virus/trojan (A) Own a mac (B) Have spent the time to develop the experience of the OS to put the skills to use to exploit it. So compound that with the smaller market meaning its a lot hard to get the code into the wild and spreading... and it just doesn't happen...

Don't get the illusion the mac is somehow more secure architecturally - theres some pretty bad underlying flaws in some of parts of the kernel originating from BSD that would be a root kit coders dream.
 
The kudos angle does seem very odd.

I'm sure most people writing malware are most concerned with maximum profit and marketshare, leading them to Windows, but every single one of them?
 
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