Viruses on OS X

[Doctor X]

Originally Posted by mcshelll

This made me laugh because someone from my internet provider tried to tell this exact crap recently. He even pulled out the Steve Jobs story and claimed Macs can be hacked faster on a direct attack than pc's.

If you search up there you will find a challenge on of the Gurus offered to see just how vulnerable a Mac versus a PC is. I have extended it to a number of "Mac iz jst az hakzorz az PC LOL!"ers since he posted it . . . not one of the cowards have taken him up on it.

It last happened on a thread on a non-computer forum dedicated to . . .

. . .





. . . wait for it . . .



. . .



. . . protecting your PC.

--J.D.

[Randy Singer]

Originally Posted by mouquiflu

I accept with information:
1) Virus may also come on MacOS X, even if currently there is no known virus infection on our plateform. Therefore it is not a bad idea to have antivirus SW on your Mac with uptodate definitions.

Macintosh anti-virus software requires the software developer to have a sample of the virus they are trying to provide you protection from, to be able to program the anti-virus software to be able to recognize and protect you from a particular virus. No Mac viruses currently exist, so Macintosh anti-virus software can't protect you from those viruses. At least not yet.

OS X has been out for over 8 years now. So far, there are no Macintosh viruses (there are a few incredibly rare Trojan Horses, but not a single virus), though Windows apologists have been going around for all 8 years saying that there will be lots of them "any-day now." They may be right, but so far their track record of predicting that the Mac will have viruses has been pretty poor.

Note that OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) has anti-virus software built-in.
http://www.macworld.com/article/1424...d_malware.html
Apple can update this software via Software Update as needed.

Originally Posted by mouquiflu

2) If you use VPC you are vulnerable to Windows viruses.]

That's not necessarily a concern. Most Macintosh users who are running Parallels, Fusion, or Bootcamp are running them because they only need access to one or two mission critical applications from Windows. If you don't use Windows on your Macintosh to access the Internet or to get e-mail (and the included Macintosh software is just fine for those tasks, in most cases) then the vector for receiving a virus is cut off, and a user has no real concern about getting a Windows virus.