Originally posted by: DasFox
What about viruses on Mac OSX?
Viruses on any platform is pretty easy to make. You take a program, stick a hunk of malicious code in it and send to somebody. They execute it, the malicious code does it's dirty work and viola! your infected.
This could happen in Linux just as easily as it can for OS X or Windows. So viruses could definately be a issue at one point. Presently it's not a issue. All it depends on is tricking you into running untrusted code. That is realitively easy to do.
Now another type of virus is one that depends on a programming macro embedded into documents or relying on some deception to get people to think the link or the program or the double click is doing one thing. For example, openning a jpeg image.. While it's realy doing another like using a specially crafted HTML link to launch a explorer based code hunk in outlook to access a compromised HTML server that exploits a hole in in IE to launch a peice of code on the server that installs a trojan into your system.
That's much much more likely to happen on Windows then OS X or Linux.
For instance in Linux if you were to double click on a *.jpg image on your desktop or email attatchment there is code that analizes weither or not it is actually a jpeg image. It's not as simple as Windows were you simply rely on the file extension to determine the file type.
Also there is no embedded IE code in your email client or word proccessor or image viewer that can be exploited.
Also a large portion of Macro viruses use flaws in portions of Microsoft office to execute code. I think that this type is less common nowadays.
The trouble about viruses is getting them to spread. I could target a specific type of person and send them a virus, but eventually it will get back to me.
So for viruses to be successfull in the wild it requires you to have a way for them to automaticly spread.
So a big popular way for viruses to spread in Windows is that you have a specially crafted email that has a link or attatchment that then exploits a flaw in IE or outlook or whatnot. Then the virus reads the email address book and sends it itself out to all your friends.
So for reasons I stated above this is very unlikely to work well on a OS X or Linux box, even if Linux or OS X had the market share.
On Linux and OSX you still have to worry though. Well not so much 'worry' as take precautions.
Your still vunerable from:
1. Malicious code or script that a person tricks you into running.
2. Internet Worms that infect machines running insecure services and then use the machine as a zombie to look for more machines. This has recently been a problem for Linux systems (and sometimes Windows running Apache) that are using badly programmed PHP programs (such as PHP-based bullentien board systems) were the administrators of these systems didn't keep their system up to date and had PHP scripting language version with known flaws in it.
3. Directed human attackers probing your system. This is the most dangerous. Once they target your system and attack it then if they are successfull they will install a rootkit that will make them very difficult to detect. (there are reliable ways to detect them, but it requires having seperate computers and/or boot media to setup things like Tripwire and Snort, which is time consuming, potentionally expensive, and difficult.)
4. Bad third party programs written by good people who make mistakes and open holes in your system.
5. Browser/IM/Email/etc client flaws. Anything that goes out on a network to bring back information.
(and other stuff I probably forgot or are unaware of)
To combat these threats you need to keep your system up to date.
Only use programs from trustworthy sources.
Minimize your network footprint, in otherwords disable and/or block off network access to services running on your computer. If there is nothing listenning to the network, there is no place for a worm to find a vunerability and inject malicious code.
This is the same for any OS. Just some OSes make it easier then others.
🙂
It is worth looking at OpenBSD and learn to understand why they have a PROVEN track record for being the most secure general purpose operating system aviable.
