Lewis Brock wrote:
any system at all is vulnerable to attack. whether its direct port
hacking, viruses designed for specific functions or other methods of
destruction. no machine is safe at all. but the likelyhood of a virus
hitting a macintosh is incredibly incredibly slim. viruses are
designed by hackers who either just want to inflict pain on personal
users, bring down companies in one fowl swoop or whatever.
Actually, more commonly these days, the Virus writer (be it a worm,
trojan, or other malicious piece of code) intends to gather information.
This would be personal banking information or data to be used to gain
entry in to restricted sites (eBay, PayPal etc.) The intention is to
then sell this data on to someone who will use it to gain funds or rip
you off.
Another approach is to install a piece of code that will sit on your
computer and enable illegal activities to be routed through your
machine. This therefore covers the deviants tracks, and makes it look
like you did whatever the wrong doing was.
if an idiot writes a virus for a mac you get the impression straight
away that the idiot writing it has a vendetta against apple hardware.
maybe jealousy or something like that. or just malicious intent.
This is not the way virus work these days. Long gone are the kids in
bedrooms writing bad code to annoy innocent people. Today, the virus
writers want to gain revenue or illegal access.
antivirus packages have been out for the macintosh for many years now
and to be honest through my time I've never found the need for an
antivirus.
I have had at least 3 virus on my pre Mac OS X systems. Most were under
system 7 though. It can happen, it did happen and they do exist. Mac OS
X is based on Openstep, which was a UNIX variant created by Next
Computer. Being UNIX based (well, BSD), it is far less likely that the
average Virus writer can gain access. It's also hard to install anything
on a Mac OS X computer without being asked if you want to, so that means
it's also harder for a Mac Virus writer to install software secretly.
the other probable reason for virus attacks on the mac could be this
and its only a supposable theory. Intel Architecture and the
connection with windows etc. as the PPC chips upto the G5 series were
never harmed by virus code. maybe apple should have thought about it a
bit more.
This is rubbish. Mac's with PowerPC processors had virus in the System
7.1 - 9.22 days. To say they didn't is just not correct. There weren't
many, but they did exist.
For the Intel platform, there has yet to be a mainstream Mac OS X virus,
just as for the PowerPC platform.
What you have to remember is, well, the difference between a PowerPC
application and an Intel application is minimal in functionality and
source code. To compile a PowerPC application for Intel using XCode is
trivial. The tools are free, and cross compilation from Intel to PowerPC
is possible. So any virus write targetting Intel could feasably
re-compile a virus to target PowerPC with little or no effort.
M
