The Australian yesterday had a column from David Frith on just this subject http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,7457276%5E15423%5E%5Enbv %5E15309,00.html
A quote: "No-one, not even an administrator, is permitted to tinker with the Mac's core system software, so a Mac OS X virus - and remember, there are currently none - could theoretically wipe out one user's files, but wouldn't be able to access any other accounts and couldn't touch the operating system itself. " This comment was quite interesting to me as clearly, all *nixes I am aware of, root has absolute privelege (after all everything is a file, and all files make use of the user/group of the running user/process to determine privelege. How does OSX do things differently.( Or is the "administrator" nor truly root on OSX?) Martin Martin Visser ,CISSP Network and Security Consultant Technology & Infrastructure - Consulting & Integration HP Services 3 Richardson Place North Ryde, Sydney NSW 2113, Australia Phone *: +61-2-9022-1670 Mobile *: +61-411-254-513 Fax 7: +61-2-9022-1800 E-mail * : martin.visserAThp.com -----Original Message----- From: Voytek Eymont [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, 8 October 2003 7:31 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [SLUG] ot: Mac OSX and virii in the open ** Reply to note from Graham Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Tue, 7 Oct 2003 14:11:57 +1000 > "To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your > Windows box, > you just need to work on it." not bad, though I like this one best that Tom sent me : > My wife, bless her cottin socks, is a Mac and a Windows user. > > She asked this question of the Mac User Society she belongs to and was > told it would be polite for her to use a Virus checker on her Mac so > she would detect it and not accidentally send the thing on again to a > Windows user > > Tom and, thanks everyone ! with what I learned today, combined with the little O;Reilly MacOSx booklet I picked, I feel better now Voytek Eymont -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
