Re: Mac Viruses Kicking In? Should we get worried?

[James S Jones]

The article was (at least) inadvertently misleading in several 
respects. First, OS X isn't more susceptible because it's a network OS 
(whatever that's supposed to mean--classic Mac OS had built-in 
networking for nearly 2 decades). The greater potential comes from the 
servers and daemons that are part of a standard UNIX distribution. This 
could allow an OS X machine to propagate viruses, but that has nothing 
to do with becoming infected in the first place. Second, as others have 
pointed out, the viruses/worms cited don't run in OS X (as implied). 
They're limited to classic Mac OS.

Windows viruses, worms, etc, generally work in one or more of three 
ways: running scripts, exploiting security holes MS deliberately left 
open to make their work easier, and stack overflow exploits.

AppleScript can control and exploit almost anything in OS X, but by 
default, even when logged in as an Administrator, the user has to 
authorize a script to do certain, potentially destructive things by 
entering a password. (Those dialog boxes can be annoying, but they're 
an important safeguard).

Apple has been very good about not leaving holes open a la MS. We Mac 
broadband users have no idea what hell the Windows world have been 
going through, recently, with network message spam dialog boxes few 
minutes.

Stack overflow exploits can happen on any OS, but with open source BSD 
UNIX there are literally thousands of people all over the globe working 
to find and patch any potential problem *before* anyone can exploit it. 
And, they don't try to cover the defects up--they tell everybody 
distributes or maintains UNIX systems and the public at large.

30 odd years of continuous UNIX development does have its advantages.

On Wednesday, August 13, 2003, at 04:28  PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
wrote:

I feel safer now that you say that, I did read all the article and the
Symantec name kept coming up, you are right.


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