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March 27, 2005
Virus Schmirus
Nice writeup, Rosyna! Sorry for the new post, I wrote too much to fit comfortably into a comment. I second the suggestion not to ever enable root. I've managed to go through four Macs without needing it - 'sudo' is perfectly sufficient for all uses I've encountered, and much safer. I think the virus issue is fairly simple - it's harder to write an OS X virus than a Windows virus because of the respective operating systems were designed. It is definitely NOT impossible to write an OS X virus, it's just more difficult. One will appear eventually - hopefully it continues to be a slow process and we can continue our current virus-less nirvana. Part of the reason, I think, is that OS X has occasional isolated security holes. Windows has occasional classes of security holes. Each class of problems can cause one, many or an infinite number of potential attack vectors. Classes of vulnerabilities are much more difficult to fix than isolated incidents, especially because there tends to be an inclination to fix specific isolated attack vectors that have been exploited rather than the underlying class of vulnerabilities (ActiveX, I'm looking at you!). To the best of my knowledge, OS X has thus far had only one class of security holes (see Paranoid Android). Apple fixed it moderately quickly, thus closing all of the possible attack vectors associated with it. Translating to a jargonless analogy, Windows has a lot more loose windows and cheap locks for a thief to jiggle. Spyware is another matter - it would be as easy or easier to write successful spyware for OS X. I'll exclude a password sniffer here, as OS X provides technical means to make password sniffing difficult. But writing something that, for example, tracks your website surfing habits and reports back to the mothership would be trivial to write and to embed into a seemingly innocuous Trojan application. I don't know why such a thing hasn't already appeared (but I'm obviously damned glad it hasn't!).   Posted by jason at March 27, 2005 07:05 PMTrackback Pings: TrackBack URL for this entry: Related:
Comments
Be on the lookout a lot of virii and malcious code is headed your way in the future as the mac userbase Viruses. The plural of virus is viruses. "Virii" is the latin plural of the non-word "virius". "Viri" is the latin plural of "vir" (man). Posted by: Clay on March 28, 2005 7:52 AMBonkers, I think your missing the point. OSX is more secure than windows. OSX gaining market share is gonna make it more attractive to virus writers, but whether they're successful is another matter. For one, viruses are harder to write for OSX and for another it's even harder to write a virus that deletes an entire HD. And if market share is proportional to the number of viruses then how come Linux has so many more viruses than OSX ;) Posted by: Pilky on April 3, 2005 5:24 AMLet's see.. some Latin words with an i in their stem have two i's if they are dative. In this use, it was in the nominative case, so you would be right. --Sam Posted by: Sam on April 3, 2005 8:44 PMI found spyware which actually works in OS X, after people got alerted at forums etc, they silently "pulled it" with a new version. Won't use name but it was similar to TopMoxie and coded in pure java. No, not any of opensource stuff at source forge. Posted by: Ilgaz on April 19, 2005 3:00 AM |