“Thank you for helping mark the 200,000th entry into the VirusScan malware (malevolent software) detection database,” Jimmy Kuo writes for McAfee Avert Labs Blog.
“We mark this moment simply as a milestone in our continual trip to fend off the bad stuff from everyone’s machines,” Kuo writes. “It is alarming that we reach this milestone so soon after September 2004 when the count reached 100,000. Eighteen years to reach 100,000. Less than two years to double. Looking ahead, our researchers expect yet another doubling in a similar timeframe. So, 100,000 new threats in the past two years, 200,000 new threats to come in the next two years!”
“Thanks also to the cadre of dedicated anti-malware researchers who on this day added that 200,000th malware detection entry, so we may pursue our enjoyment of the Internet experience with a little less worry,” Kuo writes.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What worry? Oh, sorry, we use Macs. Happy 200,000th!
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.
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Related MacDailyNews articles:
Sophos Security: Dump Windows, Get a Mac – July 05, 2006
16-percent of computer users are unaffected by viruses, malware because they use Apple Macs – June 15, 2005
Apple: ‘Get a Mac. Say ‘Buh-Bye’ to viruses’ – June 01, 2006
Apple Macs and viruses: Fact vs. FUD – May 26, 2006
Mossberg: Is there a virus threat for Apple Macs? – May 11, 2006
ZDNet: How many Mac OS X users affected by the last 100 viruses? None, zero, not one, not ever – August 18, 2005
Intel CEO Otellini: If you want security now, buy a Macintosh instead of a Wintel PC – May 25, 2005
Defending Windows over Mac a sign of mental illness – December 20, 2003
Eric, I haven’t eaten any crow at all. I directly quoted a legitimate dictionary definition of a Trojan which clearly defines a Trojan as a TYPE OF VIRUS.
Why do you seem hell bent on making me out to be an enemy? These are not my words, they are from Webster’s Dictionary.
Interpret the information however you like, I don’t really care. My point is that a Trojan is widely accepted as being a type of Virus.
Of those 114,000 PC “Viruses” that Apple quotes in it’s commercial, thousands are classified as Trojans.
This arguement is all semantics. I’ll take my odds with a mac, 2 (whatever you want to call them) vs. 200,000 windows viruses. It’s not rocket science, unless you can’t do the math.
Webster . . .
YOU ARE A ONE-TRICK PONY! The word “Webster” means absolutely NOTHING as confimation of your opinion! It is NOT a blessing from the Pope, for crying out loud. It is merely a group of wishy-washy lexicographers who TODAY define the word “bad” as “good”! How does that factoid grab you, dumbass?
If “bad” equals “good” in your scheme of things–and it clearly DOES if you’re still on the “Webster” bandwagon–then I guess a trojan IS a virus.
But, then again: war is peace, freedom is slavery, etc., etc. (You are the living, breathing embodiment of George Orwell’s worst nightmare.)
don’t know if i’m wrong but i just noticed security updates for 10.3 and 10.4 but not 10.2. So when 10.5 gets released, will security updates to 10.3 end?
then I guess a trojan IS a virus.
—————-
Good, then we’re in agreement!
And now I know that the next time I need the definition of a word I’ll check the Dictionary of Nicole Kidman’s Meatus instead of Merriam Webster!:)
So I’m not clear about this, MDN. Are you saying my PC is unsafe? Not sure I’m getting the gist.
A Trojan is a malicious piece of software masqurading as a legitiment one. It requires action by a user to inflict it’s damage. It may arrive unannounced say on the back of a virus or part of a real file, but it won’t gain control without some sort of user intervention on the trojan itself. Once a trojan has gained control, it can become a virus and infect other machines on a network, depending on the level of control it gains.
A Virus is a malicious piece of software that does infect any machine it comes into contact with, without direct user intervention on the malicious software itself. It too can arrive unannounced, piggy backed on infected files. The difference between a trojan and a virus is that a trojan requires action upon the malicious file itself to work.
A virus can carry a trojan and a trojan (once it gains control) can spawn viruses.
In the story of the Trojan Horse, where the name for a trojan is taken from. A large hollow horse was given to a enemy as a gift, which they took inside their gates. Once inside, attackers emerged from the horse and destroyed the city.
So for a malicious piece of software to be considered a trojan, it requires knowning cooperation from the user on the malicious software itself. It requires the user to lower their defenses. A virus does not need a user to lower their defenses.
I hope that clears things up.
MDW: “clearly” “I can see clearly now the rain is gone” – Carley Simon
A Trojan Horse is not, in and of itself, a virus. It may contain a virus in its payload. It’s unfortunate that Websters Dictionary Student Edition has it wrong.
There are two Mac Viruses,
Tell me, is it a Virus if absolutely no real Mac users have ever had their Mac infected by it?
In other words is a proof of concept, that never infects anyone in the real world, really a virus or is it just a proof of concept?
Can an unprotected stock Mac running OS X be taken out of the box, be hooked up to broadband without a hardware firewall, and be infected by malware in 20 minutes?
How about 20 hours?
How about 20 days?
The answer is NO!
If the answer is no, then there are no viruses for the Mac OS X.
Interesting debate.
I don’t think anyone disagrees that a Trojan requires user interaction while a Virus does not.
The bigger question is whether or not a Trojan is considered part of the Virus family and should be classified as a type of Virus. My personal opinion is that yes, although a Trojan requires user interaction, it is part of the Virus family.
To add more confusion to the matter. Apple is advertising that there are 114,000 PC Viruses while it is known that a large percentage of those are actually Trojans and other types of malware. At the same time, Apple says that there are zero Viruses for the Mac when there are clearly two known and documented Trojans.
In reading some of Webster’s posts, i see she is just a disinformation-spreading-Troll. Ignore her.
Trevor: I think the Wikipedia answers your question well:
“Trojan horse programs cannot operate autonomously, in contrast to some other types of malware, like viruses or worms. Just as the Greeks needed the Trojans to bring the horse inside for their plan to work, Trojan horse programs depend on actions by the intended victims. As such, if trojans replicate and even distribute themselves, each new victim must run the program/trojan. Therefore their virulence is of a different nature, depending on successful implementation of social engineering concepts rather than flaws in a computer system’s security design or configuration.”
Sorry, MDN munged the link. Try this Wikipedia link instead.
Be bery bery careful of trojan. trojan made of rubber. rubber break. Chico know, rubber break.
-Chico Escuela
Big AI,
Very good, another piece of advice users forget.
USAToday did an article on this back on 11-29-2004.
“Unprotected PCs can get hijacked within minutes of accessing the Internet”
Full article:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2004-11-29-honeypot_x.htm
Each PC was connected to the Internet via a broadband DSL connection and monitored for two weeks in September. Break-in attempts began immediately and continued at a constant and high level: an average of 341 per hour against the Windows XP machine with no firewall or recent security patches, 339 per hour against the Apple Macintosh and 61 per hour against the Windows Small Business Server. Each was sold without an activated firewall.
Less than four minutes from start of the test, an intruder breaks into Windows XP SP1.
There were no successful compromises of the Macintosh.
A 2 week test, that’s 336 hours.
Thanks for the link Rainy Day, However, even the wikipedia page still leaves some confusion. Especially the sentence “Therefore their virulence is of a different nature.”. They are referring to a Trojan as a type of viri, which would lead me to believe that a Trojan is a part of the Virus family.
And reading further down on the Wikipedia page comes this paragraph:
Trojan Horse viruses can cause a great deal of damage to a personal computer but even more damaging is what they can do to a business, particularly a small business that usually does not have the same virus protection capabilities as a large business. Since a Trojan Horse virus is hidden it is harder to protect yourself or your company from them but there are things that you can do.
Let us acquiesce to the heavily disputed “fact” that there are 2 known Trojans out there for a Mac. If current trends hold true, then in 2008 the Mac OS will be 100,000 times safer than Vista with its projected 200,000 viruses/Trojans.
I was about to make an analogy here, but it really isn’t necessary. It should be blatantly obvious to even the simplest of morons that choosing between any two things where one is 100,000 times more likely to cause problems than the other is no real choice at all.
But, for those of you still curious, here are a few examples of things with a 1:100,000 ratio. Which would you rather do…?
Eat 1 inch of taffy or eat 1.58 miles of taffy?
Carpet a 1 square yard closet or carpet 20 football fields (…or 5 city blocks)?
Walk 1 foot or walk nearly 19 miles?
Jog 1 mile or jog around the Earth 4 times?
Toss a paperclip (1 gram) at your coworker’s head or throw your stocky 220 pound boss the same distance?
Wait 1 minute for your computer to boot up or wait 69.4 days?
Find a dollar on the ground or find a 36 foot stack of dollar bills (by the way, it would weigh as much as your 220 lb boss)?
Last, but not least…
Lift a gallon of milk (8 lbs) onto the kitchen counter or lift a fueled C5 Galaxy cargo plane with a full load of two M1-A1 Abrams battle tanks and 73 soldiers (400 tons total) onto the kitchen counter? [ photos at http://www.theaviationzone.com/images/html/galaxy/page2.asp ]
Don’t allow Microsoft to downplay the size of this problem; 100,000 of anything is a lot!
The fact that someone mislabel a trojan as a virus does not make it more correct.
Trojan programs CONTAIN malware, they are not per se the malicious program. A trojan is a legitimate-looking program that contains malicious code.
On the net you may find correct definitions as well as incorrect ones that call virus everything, even saying “a worm is a kind of virus”.
Just do on google: “define: trojan” and you’ll get correct and incorrect definitions.
During Galileo time it was well written in every textbook that the Earth was at the center and the Sun revolved around it. It did not make it more correct then as it does not make it correct labeling a trojan program “a virus” per se. It is not the virus, it is the vector.
It is as silly and uninformed and imprecise and ignorant to say that the Anopheles is the cause of Malaria. It is not, it is the vector of the genus Plasmodium that causes Malaria.
People say the Anophele causes Malaria which is wrong, but ignorance is bliss and most do not even know about Plasmodium.
BTW, there are kind of Anopheles that DO NOT carry the Plasmodium.
Webster is just part of the majority who believe a trojan is a virus: some even write on the internet and on sites.
Others, like the Princeton’s Wordnet get it right:
Trojan: a program that appears desirable but actually contains something harmful; “the contents of a trojan can be a virus or a worm”;
Can we put the case to rest now? Scarcely informed people call every malicious software a virus. Little informed ones know various kind of malware but still call them all collectively “virus”.
More informed ones know the kinds and their differences: to them a virus is a virus is a virus. Period. Other kinds of malware that do not satisfy all features of a virus are malware of other kinds.
Calling everything a virus just tell this last category of people the level of ignorance you have on the matter: You know who you are.
Trevor, the phrase “Trojan Horse viruses” means different things to different categories of people described in my previous post.
You might – on first categories – understand it as “SEEE? Told you, a Trojan is a virus”. The last category of people smiles and reads it correctly as “the virus that is carried by a Trojan Horse program”.
The virus is hidden in that it might come to you by a legitimate operation like installing a program you truly want to install. But doing that opens the door to the virus it contains.
Usually, one put a virus in a trojan in that the author has not found a way to easily penetrate its target or because the goal is to infect without raising suspicions.p
GmJm
Gimmie the 36 foot stack of dollars! Maybe I can buy a MacBook Pro with it!
Princeton’s Wordnet get it right:
Trojan: a program that appears desirable but actually contains something harmful; “the contents of a trojan can be a virus or a worm”;
Welcome back Seahawk! As usual pearls of wisdom.
Princeton guys correctly differentiate Anopheles from Plasmodium (I knew the mosquito was the vector of something but did not know the name). Smart guys are at Princeton.
Trevor: While you may be correct in your inference that “virulence” and “virus” share a common root, according to the Oxford dictionary, the word “virulence” simply means “extremely severe or harmful in its effects.” When used to refer to a pathogen, especially a virus, it simply means “highly infective.”
By the way, the word “viri” means “men.” The plural of “virus” is “viruses.”
Webster’s : the acme of all that is learned and sublime.
Very good points, Seahawk. I am often irked by people calling dolphins or whales “fish,” or chimpanzees or other apes “monkeys,” or confusing caps with hats (or vice versa), etc. Words have meaning, and when we use them carelessly, we dilute their meaning and make language even more ambiguous than it already is.