Chris Hoogendyk wrote:
Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
LuKreme wrote:
On 11-Nov-2009, at 18:34, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
I will point out that MacOS 7, os* & os9 were HIGHLY virus-prone,
yet there were far fewer of them than OSX today.
Er… that is simply not true. Not in anyway.
As I recall, there were a total of 31 viruses for System 7 and one
CD-ROM worm for System 8/9 (Autostart Worm).
It IS true. Obviously you were one of the lucky younger folks who
never had to do much admining of Macs. I've admined networks with
Macs on them since the Mac Toaster came out.
Symantec Antivirus for MacOS (pre-OSX) when it was still available was
up to several hundred for MacOS Classic. Heck, one of the first
Apple viruses was Leap-A - it infected Apple IIs back in 1982.
Trust me, I used to work at Symantec - they NEVER sell a product that
they can't make money on, not for long, anyways. If Mac Classic was
as virus resistant as you think it was, Symantec would have never
got into that market.
MacOS Classic was particularly bad since so many of them were in
classroom lab environments - when 1 got a virus, they all would
since apple filesharing considered everything on the Appletalk network
a trusted system.
Keep in mind of course that few Mac Classic systems were on the Internet
past 2003. Classic's Internet days didn't last much more than 5-6
years, the most common vector for MacOS Classic system viruses to
spread was infected files shared on floppies or downloaded from BBS
systems.
Everything changed when MacOS X came. Last year, Macworld found a
grand total of 49 infected MacOS X systems - yep, that's 49 in
the entire history of MacOSX. But, don't get too puffed up about it,
the winner of the Zero Day Mac cracking contest has repeatedly warned
that there are more than enough Macs out there for a Mac bot to be
self-sustaining.
And, I still think there's only been less than 10 Linux viruses, all of
them laboratory curiosities only.
I don't know about Linux viruses; BUT, I do remember less than ten years
ago when it was virtually impossible to build a Linux box with a hot
online connection, because you would get hacked before you could even
download the patches. I had a friend who built his system and got hacked
several times before he decided he needed to download patches ahead of
time and build it all in an off line environment. That gave him enough
time to go through all the patches and lock down procedures before he
put it online. He still got hacked again at least once after that.
I also heard stories of my son doing battle with hackers who had gotten
into his Linux system.
Keep in mind that those were not the Linus-written Linux programs, those
were programs like Telnet, Sendmail, etc. which predated both Linux, the
GPL, and GNU in many cases - and Linus merely took those programs and
applied his license to them.
I think the OpenBSD people in particular would object to people saying
that one of their boxes with Sendmail compiled on it, that was hacked
into, was insecure. FreeBSD likely as well.
Once Linus's clue phone rang and he changed the load defaults to
have all those programs disabled during installation, Linux stopped
having those problems.
MacOS X is a bit different animal because Apple only pulled over the
FreeBSD kernel and NeXT code when they created Darwin - and they have
done their best to remove or disable the good Unix utilities, and
replace them with their irritating GUI ones.
When you have a program like Flash that is insecure and is a vector
for bots and viruses to infect an OS, it's not really accurate to claim
that the OS is insecure just because it got hacked as a result of
Flash - incidentally, both MacOS X and Windows have been compromised
as a result of loading Flash on them.
Ted
