Quote:
Originally Posted by rudack
Time for a little education on Mac Viruses.
There are no known OS X Viruses in the wild. Apple offered 25k to the first hacker who could write one that has an executable code that attaches itself to a program or file, just as the viruses do in Windows and spread. To this date the prize has not been claimed. There are hundreds of thousands of windows viruses and there are a handful of Mac OS 9 viruses but still none for OSX. This has nothing to do with popularity it has to do with the file system and kernel on the Mac OSX. (unix based). It’s is a well architected OS compared to windows. Is it unhackible? No.
Did you know Microsoft found a security hole in Windows 7 that has been in their OS since 1995? Let me type that again…. 1995…. This just goes to show you that MS just builds crap on top of crap. Lip stick on a pig. Look at Windows 7 - It is windows vista with a few enhancements and a fix for UAC. Yay. Get back to me when they launch WinFS… Been waiting 8 years already.
Viruses on the whole are on the way down. Trojans and Spyware is where it is at these days and 99.9% of the time it is because of the browser and not the OS and IE is just a pig....  |
Let's add to this point. A lot of people claim that the reason there are more hackers working Microsoft viruses than Apple viruses is that Microsoft is more popular. This is a great point. A virus on Windows would do far more potential damage to the overall community simply because more people could be victims. This, however, operates on an assumption: that hackers are motivated by doing damage alone. If I were a hacker, I would be highly motivated to work toward a $25,000 prize or simply to be the first to break the uninfected Macintosh. It would be computer history, and enough money to start saving for a car and a home or, if I were a hacker, a supercomputer I guess.
Windows has been very much the same for a very long time. Each new release adds features to the already feature-packed operating system. This is no disrespect. Microsoft computers can do everything Apple computers can do. Can they do everything with the same resources? Can they do everything for as long, as quickly, and as frequently?