From Apple eNews, June 1, 2006:
It’s really sad that so many people have to be wary about opening email, visiting websites, chatting with presumed “buddies,” or downloading music, photos, movies or other files over the Internet.
No one should have to zealously guard their computers against spyware, viruses, trojan horses, or various other types of malware. Or run a bewildering assortment of (quickly obsolete) virus-protection apps. And no one should have to run a computer to a nearby computer store, so it can be “cleaned” on a routine basis.
Do you know why people put up with that? If their cars didn’t drive where they wanted to go; their TVs didn’t play what they wanted to watch; or their phones didn’t connect to the party they called, how long would they keep using them?
Apple provides more info online about Mac’s lack of viruses here.
By the end of 2005, there were 114,000 known viruses for PCs. In March 2006 alone, there were 850 new threats detected against Windows. Zero for Mac. While no computer connected to the Internet will ever be 100% immune from attack, Mac OS X has helped the Mac keep its clean bill of health with a superior UNIX foundation and security features that go above and beyond the norm for PCs. When you get a Mac, only your enthusiasm is contagious. – Apple’s “114,000 viruses? Not on a Mac.” webpage.
Subscribe to Apple’s free eNews: http://www.apple.com/enews/subscribe/
Read Apple’s eNews online: http://www.apple.com/enews/currenteissue/
MacDailyNews Take: Finally, Apple’s gloves are off. Let’s go!
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Related articles:
Apple Macs and viruses: Fact vs. FUD – May 26, 2006
Mossberg: Is there a virus threat for Apple Macs? – May 11, 2006
Macs and viruses: the true story – May 02, 2006
FUD Alert: Viruses don’t catch up to the Mac – May 01, 2006
Gartner: Boot Camp won’t expose Mac OS X to Windows viruses or worms – April 13, 2006
The Idiot’s Guide to Mac Viruses For Dummies 101 – February 24, 2006
Atlanta Journal-Constitution asks: Is ‘Mac virus’ all just propaganda from Mac haters? – February 20, 2006
FBI: Viruses, spyware, other computer-related crimes cost U.S. businesses $67.2 billion per year – February 01, 2006
Microsoft apologists and why Apple’s Mac OS X has zero viruses – October 24, 2005
Hackers already targeting viruses for Microsoft’s Windows Vista – August 04, 2005
Thorin:
“Good ‘ole System 7.6.1”
Yep! AND illustrator 5 had just come out…it let you work in PREVIEW mode. Wow! How old am I?
Nevermind.
Thanks, Thorin! <bow>
DJ:
I still have floppies for Illustrator 88 around here somewhere. Yikes. At one time, I thought of re-tiling my bathroom with AOL floppies. Only practical use.
Ampar:
Wow! IL ’88. That was a GREAT program.
So we are destined for the MAC old folks home. Imagine, sitting around in chairs saying:
“Phooey! In MY day you had to HAND CRANK a computer to get it running. We didn’t use NORTON we took viruses like a MAN!”
“Stupid, young whipper-snappers with their fancy-schmancy Intel chips! We used Motorola chips…and we LIKED it!”
: )
Where is the $100,000,000 advertising budget for the TV and print marketing campaign? That is what Apple needs.
And it is good to see Apple’s written recognition of the Unix community that is largely responsible for the designed in security robustness of all Unix based operating systems, including OS X and Linux.
BTW, Another coup for Apple would be to provide virtualized support for Windows, including Vista and previous versions, which can protect files from being corrupted — unlike dual booting, e.g., Boot Camp. This would be absolute dynamite in IT departments. Since most surveys show that corporate IT take up of Vista will be a long slow process, this gives even the Windows only shops a compelling reason to buy Macs. Of course those Macs do contain a sort of virus from a certain perspective — Mac OS X. I would love to see Apple either create such a system or buy it (Parallels, perhaps?) and not have to wait for Leopard to get this capability. Apple could put it out like Boot Camp, as a beta.
DJ, you are going to make me pee my pants.
“Stupid, young whipper-snappers with their fancy-schmancy Intel chips! We used Motorola chips…and we LIKED it!”
Dude, check out me new Mac IIfx. It has a 68030 at 40mhz WITH a math
coprocessor! It only cost me $5000.00
it burns: that’s total rubbish. anyone who calls themself a ‘hacker’ who has never heard of a mac is a scriptkiddy. the ‘security through obscurity’ thoery is a myth: os 9 had a ton of viruses, and it had far fewer users than os x.
Thorin:
Wow! Imagine what that 5G’s get’s you today!
The IIfx was a tricky machine if I remember. Don’t get me wrong…good machine…but something about the logic board.
My OLD memory is failing me.
It burns!!!! wrote
<Stupid, Apple.
A lot of hackers have never HEARD of a Mac or how secure their design is. But now, if they are on Apple’s mailing list, they will get taunts like these.>
Uh, if they never heard of a Mac, why on Earth would they be on an Apple email list? Thinking is not just for breakfast anymore, try it all day long
I bet a lot of virus writers use a mac. They don’t have time to be dealing with down time (especially from there own virus). And they certainly don’t want to pay for virus protection.
Viuses lack critical mass on the Mac.
Virus writing isn’t just a hobby anymore, it’s an industry. Virus writers have gone professionnal. They have a purpose and an income source. (spam bots, DoS attacks, data collection, etc.). All of these require that a large number of machines run the (virus) program.
Installed base and automatic propagation are key to hitting that critical mass. Viruses are a perishable good. They have to spread and produce their effect before a patch is widely available and installed. Propagation that requires every user to perform an action will just not cut it. That’s a first major hurdle in developing Mac viruses. It would take much too long before enough idiots are caught (even if almost half the population is below average — and dare I say those who buy Macs aren’t representative of this statistics at this moment).
The second hurdle is the number of potential targets. Even if all connected Macs could be hit, that would still not be enough infected machines to be profitable. It’s not obscurity that’s the issue here it’s simply a question opportunity, facility and critical mass. Why go for a three ricochet shot to hit a bee in mid-flight when you have an unprotected target as big as a mountain that you can’t miss even with your eyes closed.
So, in short, Mac viruses are much harder to create and would hit much fewer people. Not a winning combination for a (professionnal) virus writer.
Does this mean that when more Macs are out there, the virus writers will start to take notice. I don’t know but if I were in their shoes and the market was up to a 50/50 split between Macs and PCs, I would still go for the easier target that is Windows. I would get a much better return on investment (cause the investment would still be much smaller). Remember that it’s not a one-shot thing but you have to be able to produce new viruses regularly for the thing to be lucrative.
We’re still a very long way off from the point at which virus writers, in desperation of a crumbling Windows market, start to reluctanly go for the tough target (Mac OS X) or simply find something else to make a buck out of (which, given the lazy nature of such criminals is the most likely outcome).
Now, you might say how about the hobbyist writing viruses. My answer is simply to look at what virus programs are doing today. These hobbyists are a rare and dying breed. Cutting the problem down to just these guys would be heaven compared to the current outbreaks.
DJ,
You are right, the IIfx was tricky. I used to do board level repairs on them when I worked for a major reseller. If I remember correctly, it had a convoluted chipset that handled memory management and the NUBUS slots concurrently. It was a tad messy. I mentioned it because it was the “big performer” before the Quadra 700, 900, 950 came out.
THORIN:
YES! That was it. (gag…cough…NUBUS SLOTS…hee hee)
ALTOS:
Well stated and sound logic.
Altos,
Very well said, and I completely agree.
Re: Mac Nostalagia
Well, when I was young electricity hadn’t been invented yet. I had to write Hypercard stacks by the light from the fireplace. And I had to walk twenty miles in the snow, uphill both ways, to the local BBS just to get ASCII porn.
Kids these days . . .
“Nostalagia”
And apparently the aged Mac users also stubbornly refuse to use TIger’s built-in spell checker.
AMPAR:
LOL!!!
ASCII PORN? I missed something….damn!
DJ
I would misspell words too if I had ASCII porn on the brain.
“Come on, baby. My BBS is 9600 baud. Dial me up tonight!”
“These hobbyists are a rare and dying breed“
Well, here’s good news. A tiny snowflake landing on a very hot stove has a better chance of surviving than a hobbyist hacker has of breeding.
MW: image
Where are all of the “security through obscurity” trolls?
Aldus PageMaker. That was the best.
Real Hypercard stacks? You were lucky.
All we had were a cardboard box with a picture of Hypercard stacks drawn on it!
Our dad used to make us write us names, in HyperText, 500 times with one finger before we could have supper. When I say supper, I mean a handful of cold binary bits that he found on a spare 400K floppy.
Then he made us polish the square mouse with our tongues. We were so poor we couldn’t afford a phone so he made us run to the nearest BBS to collect that ASCII porn, which we couldn’t always see because we only had 1 MB of RAM.
And we thought ourselves lucky!
<>Static Mesh said: “Notice how this was released about the same time Windows Vista beta 2 stated making waves?
A little late uh Apple?”</i>
Meaning: WHAT THE FSCK TOOK YOU SO LONG!!!
hahaha got you
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The reformed MacDude.
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(it’s me really! I’m cured!)
Ampar & DJ…
You *are* the young whipper snappers!
Back in the day before punch cards caught on, my first real computer task was decoding computer punch tape. Then we got the new fangled keypunch machine with those neat new cards! Wow, 80 characters per card, and we could crank them out using the teletype derivative after coding everything on those 11×17 coding sheets (one line on the page per card, about 40 lines per page IIRC). Next came terminals with paper print outs… 8″ wide yellow paper on large rolls that we tore off when the printer/teletype was done clattering away.
Ah but then we graduated to glass terminals… my first one literally was a modified TV monitor with real wood sides and back — and it had enough tubes in it to keep my underground office warm.
Yes, I remember well the days of 8″ floppies that were single sided and had to be soft sectored at the factory. I still have a bad reaction when remembering coding in one of DEC’s first shipping languages: it only allowed a total of 286 arithemetic variables and 26 string variables so variable reuse was required and done vary, vary carefully wasting precious compute cycles on clearing the memory location before assigning a new value/use to the old designation. It made FORTRAN IV look like it was a gift from the gods.
Then the huge leap to the Apple ][ and simplified file locking really meant placing non printing characters into the file name. Just ad a “^p” or a “^h” or “~c” somewhere within the file name to make the file very difficult to access. And BASIC. Simplistic but not bad for quick and dirty coding of test projects.
The Internet? Just a mish/mash of different nets not yet joined together. Fun days on BIX and GENIE and SAABRE. And Ethernet? How about 3B5 (3 megabit over thick coax with vampire taps). None of that 40 Gbps Ethernet stuff for us!
I still remember seeing my first SONY word processor with that strange 3 1/2 inch floppy drive (though some people wanted to call it a “flexy drive” because of the disks’ hard case). Little did I know that within a year or so Apple would be coming out with a computer with that drive in it.
We later graduated to the Mac and Pascal. The world was much, much better. Printing with an Imagewriter at quad density (288 dpi) made things look close to what they should — and, no more using those noisy band printers or those flakey daisy wheel printers! Just think, I only had to send something to those huge offset printers when I absolutely had to.
I think I still have my original AOL 0.93 disk around here somewhere. And Guy sending a note with my “real” AOL 1.0 disks. Back then AOL members were counted in hundreds not millions and we knew where the service was started (hint: Think Apple and AppleLink and for a while it was ONLY on the Mac). You could actually send emails to Steve Case back then and expect to get a response — long before he got a big head and didn’t return emails from virtually anyone, including his VPs sometimes.
Then the fat Mac came out followed shortly by hacks to add an internal hard drive. Oh and don’t forget MacCharlie, a hardware add on which included a limited IBM compatible PC in it with a 5 1/4″ floppy drive. I’ll never forget the 8″ Bernoulli drives by Iomega.
But what really caught me was Absoft’s FORTRAN 77 on the fat Mac. Truly windowed programming (probably the first windowed IDE I ever used). I could step through programs and watch the variables change step by step. It increased my programming productivity by a factor of 100.
Finally, Pagemaker and the LaserWriter came out … everyone was buying Macs. There went our uniqueness. We were now mainstream.
Being part of a very small core that is different by design rarely lasts…
we all grow old and very often join the mainstream…
Someday Ampar and DJ you’ll make it into the “Old Hacker’s Home” (using the term as it was meant back in the day, not as it is often thought to mean now). When you get there some of us will have been there long enough to still call you “young whipper snappers”!
But more on topic…
For several years there was a rallying cry that no Mac web server had ever been hacked. There were even several challenges out there (with prizes ranging from a Pizza to US$10,000). Finally someone actually hacked a Mac web server (not through the Mac System software or through the web server software, but through a third application called Lasso — and Blue World, IIRC, issued a fix in less than 24 hours.
Apple has effectively issued a similar challenge. However, the only prize is fame this time. How long before a true virus gets set out into the wild? Clearly none of us know, but my guess (purely a guess) is that it will happen before 1 January 2008.
Aldus PageMaker. That was the best.
ARE YOU FRIGGING DRUNK?
Pagemaker was the worst pagelayout software ever!
It was slow, it couldn’t open more than a few pages at a time and was buggy.
Even Ready Set Go! was better at the time.
With Quark I was able to have 6 entire newspapers open at the same time and switch between any of them instantly. That combined with printing buffering software I was 20x as more productive than a person using Pagemaker and printing each typeset page at a time.
Now fast forward to the present and Quark is crap compared to InDesign. But I don’t like the idea of Adobe owning the whole show, we all know happens when that occurs.
Microsoft.
Nice, shadowself!
A few notes: I used graphite card readers in high school to run math programs in BASIC. Keeping cards in order was a pain not to mention encoding them. I had a TRS-80 and an early Timex Sinclair. I also used GENIE and CompuServe for a while. And a hint as to how long ago I used AOL, my e-mail address was mdg@aol.com. I used to haunt the Mac help boards eons ago.
Good times.