Viruses and Worms

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If a lot of people are switching over to Mac, doesn't that mean there will be more viruses and worms?
 
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Yep, I can see that.
 
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Does Mac do better with preventing viruses and worms because so few are written for Macs, or because they have a better way of dealing with it?
 
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Does Mac do better with preventing viruses and worms because so few are written for Macs, or because they have a better way of dealing with it?

The answer to that question is both... But the sad fact is that as more switch over to the Mac and OS X at some point more people will start trying to find ways around the operating system and some day we may well have just as much problem as the pc users do now.
 
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I'd say it's because Apple's market share is still relatively low. If Apple took over the world tomorrow and Windows only had a small market share, you'd see a major role reversal. Trust me, I know a couple of guys who have shown me how easily they can break into a Mac, they have heavy Unix backgrounds and know they're way around a LOT of security features. I guy I work with cracked my Mac on a VPN router here at work in 10 minutes flat, he has a Masters degree in Computer Science, he used to use SPARC stations all day long in college. He also had a demo of NeXt machine at his college he told me, pretty cool little bit of history.
 
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The answer to that question is both... But the sad fact is that as more switch over to the Mac and OS X at some point more people will start trying to find ways around the operating system and some day we may well have just as much problem as the pc users do now.

How far down the road do you see this happening? Do you think Mac has a good plan for this?
 
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In 15 years of internet connection I've never once had a virus, even on windows machines. I'd say most of your chances of getting a worm or a virus is all about personal habits online. Other than that, when I see an OS X security report there's a fix very shortly afterward.
 
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How far down the road do you see this happening? Do you think Mac has a good plan for this?

That is really hard to say. I am no expert by any means and i have no knowledge of the inner workings at Apple and what their plans may be. I figure it will probably be a few years anyway down the road, depending how how fast Mac growth is.

At this time there just aren't the numbers to really make it worth the effort, and i don't think that Apple has the "I hate Apple" numbers that Microsoft does. But things change every day and some day they might have, if not the lead, then at least enough to make it worth the effort. After all why write a virus that effects 5 million people when you can write one that effects 25 million.
 
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In 15 years of internet connection I've never once had a virus, even on windows machines. I'd say most of your chances of getting a worm or a virus is all about personal habits online. Other than that, when I see an OS X security report there's a fix very shortly afterward.

I would have to agree.

college = poor = stole things = viruses
all grown up = job = buy things = not a virus since

I cannot believe how some people can manage to blow up their PC's hours after they get them.
 

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I cannot believe how some people can manage to blow up their PC's hours after they get them.

I can. People expect their computer to be just like a household appliance - toss out the manual and just use it. That will only get you by for so long. There was a time that when you bought a computer, you did so not just for the content it could provide you, but also because you enjoyed the computer itself. Those times are gone now.

Those of us who invest the time to actually learn how the nuts and bolts work and take a genuine interest in the OS, other than as a means to an end, will always be less prone to things like viruses - which are most commonly distributed by social engineering techniques (be it on Windows or Mac OS).

What's scary about Windows is the number of holes that are exploited on it. This is how worms attack a system - typical viruses infect a system by ignorance on the user's part (opening an email, inserting an infected disc, downloading an infected file, etc). Worms are completely different as they exploit fundamental flaws in the OS - the user needs to do nothing other than be on the wrong network, at the wrong time.

As always, knowledge is power.
 
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Or the wrong website. It becomes humorous when you can identify the 'surfing habits' of someone by the worms they get.
 

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Or the wrong website. It becomes humorous when you can identify the 'surfing habits' of someone by the worms they get.

Yep, that's true too - forgot about that one.

Either way, I suspect Mac OS will be less susceptible in the long run to things like viruses, if only by virtue of the fact that the core OS is fairly well protected. In the Windows world, up until Vista, every user was basically root. At least on Mac OS, the user can only really manipulate the system within the context of their home folder without escalating permissions (and that should be a fairly obvious sign to the user that something isn't right if they're just randomly prompted for credentials). But once again, ignorance plays a role here. If you get into the habit of just entering your password anytime you're prompted for it, you're likely going to do some damage at some point.
 
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The fact that viruses were so common on PCs is one of the reasons I switched to Macs like 6 years ago. As time goes on I'm sure people will find a way to infect Macs and get through whatever security measures Apple has taken, but I'm just as confident in Apple that they will do what they can to prevent this and if you follow the rules and don't surf like a nincompoop you should be fine. I could be totally wrong though and be hit with a tidal wave of viruses in the months and years to come. But who knows? I <3 Apple :D
 
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I've owned Windows machines since 1996, and between McAfee and Norton, they never got infected. But one of my reasons for going back to Mac is that the cure/prevention was getting worse than the disease: Norton Internet Security put a huge drag on performance.
 
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So, since I'm not downloading porn or music/video files I should be fine, even if in the future OS X starts to be targeted as well. I can avoid viruses and worms on a Mac the same way I've been avoiding them on my PC.

I'm not exactly a computer techie, but I have always been interested in how and why something works the way it does. Will someone explain to me how Windows has left itself more exposed to viruses/worms than OS X has? In layman's terms.
 

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I've owned Windows machines since 1996, and between McAfee and Norton, they never got infected. But one of my reasons for going back to Mac is that the cure/prevention was getting worse than the disease: Norton Internet Security put a huge drag on performance.

You said it! Both of the more mainstream products are incredibly resource hungry, and getting even more so with each new version. I was also a little irritated with how they love to integrate features that are already built into Windows (like a firewall). With that said, I use AVG Anti-Virus on my VMs/Boot Camp and NOD32 on my gaming box, and neither one of them are terribly resource hungry. How effective they'll be in stopping a virus is another story.
 

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So, since I'm not downloading porn or music/video files I should be fine, even if in the future OS X starts to be targeted as well. I can avoid viruses and worms on a Mac the same way I've been avoiding them on my PC.

I'm not exactly a computer techie, but I have always been interested in how and why something works the way it does. Will someone explain to me how Windows has left itself more exposed to viruses/worms than OS X has? In layman's terms.

Well, there are quite a number of things that Apple has done well with OS X. One thing in particular is that the user is never an administrator. Even when your account is called "administrator", you never have the same kind of authority that an administrator would have in Windows (which was the default role of users up until Vista). With that being the case, even if your machine was infected with a virus, it could never do any damage to the underlying Operating System, its effects would be limited to your home folder.

Microsoft implemented something similar in Vista, called "User Account Control". The problem is that most Windows applications expect to have administrator-level access, since Windows traditionally always gave its users that. So, it becomes very intrusive as whenever an application tries to do something to the operating system, the user is constantly prompted to click "allow" or "deny". This happens so frequently in fact, that people end up just getting in the habit of clicking "allow" instead of bothering to try to understand why they're being asked.

By contrast, OS X being based on UNIX, has always been this way. So, applications are normally pretty well behaved and don't require administrator access. It should be pretty rare that you're asked to elevate your permissions (i.e. prompted for your password). In fact, it's so uncommon that it should get your attention and make you think "why am I being asked for my password". This protection mechanism is probably one of the reasons that no real viruses have been released for the Mac.

A more thorough explanation (if you're so inclined), is available here:

http://www.macobserver.com/article/2007/04/10.9.shtml
 

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I don't think so, there are so many Mac users already
Maybe some new leaks will be found, but they get fixed by updates
 

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One of the commenters out on Digg.com left this comment on a story that claimed that since Apple's market share has increased, Mac OS will now be more likely to have viruses. I think he/she said it pretty well, so I'll just quote him here:

lead2thehead said:
I was at DefCon this weekend and there were actually several talks about OS X vulnerabilities. And yes, they are real threats, but media tends to exaggerate them because:

1) Reporters are not engineers and thus, do not fully understand the problem.
2) Their articles get more circulation if they over-hype the problem.

Nobody is saying that OS X is malware-proof. But OSX, BSD, Linux and Unix all have inherent design features which make them more secure than Windows. The biggest and most important is a concept called Discretionary Access Control. Allow me to explain...

Alll *nix-based systems have a user called "root". This is a super user that can control the entire computer. In order to install software, you must first become root. In order to read or change configuration files, you must become root. If you want to modify an executable, add a shared library, modify a device driver, or change anything meaningful, you must first become root. This makes it next to impossible for a regular user to unwittingly install a virus or any piece of malware on his computer because, in order to do so, he would need root permission. This is called "Discretionary Access Control", or DAC for short.

Most Windows users will tell you that this is akin to the "Administrator" account on your PC, but that is not exactly the case. Microsoft has attempted to emulate this technique many times, but always fails miserably in its implementation. On a typical Windows PC, THE DEFAULT USER ACCOUNT has Administrator access! This makes it very easy for users to unwittingly install all kinds of malware on their computer without realizing it. Think about that for a second... why would you ever need to run a word processor or a web browser as a super user? That would mean that Internet Explorer, for example, would have permission to write to your system32 directory! Why would IE ever need to do that? And what person in their right mind would ever allow it to? It's a virus writer's dream come true.

Now let's talk about software vulnerabilities. Try to stay with me here, because this gets complicated. The vast majority of software vulnerabilities (greater than 90%) involve buffer overflow attacks. This is an attack, where by a malicious user takes control of a running program and shoe-horns its own malicious code onto the instruction stack. When this happens, the malicious instructions have the same permissions as the program it just took over. And what permissions would those be?... it depends on which user is executing the program. When you run everything as Administrator, as is the default behavior in Windows, EVERY vulnerability becomes a critical vulnerability and EVERY piece of malware can run as a super user.

Let's back up... I'm sure that by now, the Microsoft crowd is saying "Wait a second! You don't have to run everything as Administrator! You can create regular user accounts and restrict their permissions too." And they would be correct. I have never met anyone who does this on their home PC, but the option is certainly there. But even if you do that, you're still screwed because EVERY SINGLE BACKGROUND SERVICE runs as Administrator. Oh, you forgot about the background services, didn't you? Don't feel bad... Microsoft forgot about them too. Right click on "My Computer", select "Manage", and click "Services" if you want to see I'm talking about. There you can see nearly a hundred services, all running as Administrator! Break any one of them and you have Administrator access to the entire computer. Nice, huh?

But wait, you say, doesn't Mac OS have that same problem? Of course not. Only an idiot would run everything as super user. Mac OS comes from the factory with FORTY different user accounts, one for every background service that it runs. (Most flavors of Linux do this as well.) So if you happen to exploit one of them, you can only do what that small, very restricted user account can do... and it isn't much. In fact, when you buy a computer from Apple, they don't even give you the root password! You only have access to your user account... your own little world. And if you mess it up, you're not going to take down the entire computer. You'll only screw up your own account because you don't have the required permissions to screw up the rest of the OS. So the underlying architecture of Mac OS is inherently more secure.

Keep in mind that this *DARN*-poor excuse for a DAC is one of a thousand flaws with Windows. I could go on for days about the absolutely retarded design decisions made by Microsoft. Remember the outbreak of email viruses about 5 years ago? Know why those were such a big problem? Because some genius at Microsoft said, "Hey! Let's invent a scripting language that allows user to embed executable code into email messages and then execute that code automatically when you open the message!" Brilliant, huh? It's like they put that hole there on purpose so that every script kiddie with a copy of Microsoft Word could write CRIPPLING email viruses that took down servers and cost billions of dollars to fix.

The issue is much more fundamental than people think. People who use the "security through obscurity" line clearly do not comprehend the issue.

Link to the story he/she was commenting on.
 
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The issue is much more fundamental than people think. People who use the "security through obscurity" line clearly do not comprehend the issue.

Funny, I've been making that argument for years.. normally to windows administrators (notice, the programmers will agree) who simply retort that I'm a windows basher. One of these days, perhaps they'll gain a more enriched understanding of the product they support.
 

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