111–120 of 125 posts
I seriously doubt that 600,000 macs were infected... How do we know this number is correct? Because a completely unknown security firm that sells Mac antivirus software ("Dr. Web", a russian antivirus company) tweeted about it!
Completely unknown? It's on the market almost for 20 years.
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Or LibreOffice, or Eclipse, or... Java is plenty widespread. It's a good bet that most systems are going to end up with a JVM on disk somewhere after 6 mo - 1 yr of usage.
I don’t know — those aren’t apps normal people install. (And: The same people who install Eclipse, Minecraft, LibreOffice, or Photoshop are also more likely to have one of the apps that Flashback avoids co-habitating with: Little Snitch, Xcode, etc.)
It's simple to buy and install and get working. There is no reason to assume that Mac users running Minecraft are going to also have Xcode or Little Snitch.
As someone who used to sell Mac computers, I used to get asked the question "Is it true macs never get viruses?", to which I replied "No that's not true." (It was just an apple reseller store afterall so I was never compelled to bend the facts.) I'd try to explain the caveats a bit: a smaller market share and the unix based operating system requiring more permissions, yada yada, being "prohibitive" to an attack but s…
Didn't Apple used to claim that Macs didn't get viruses? I can't remember. (This would be at least several years ago, when Mac malware was still fully theoretical.) It's possible they never stated it directly, and the phrase was spread by fans. To be fair, their slogan is currently "Macs don't get PC viruses" [1]. Which is true. Although, devilishly close enough to blur the two in somebody's mind. [1] http://www.appl…
This both saddens and delights me, as it proves that Macs are now at a large enough market share that malware writers are willing to target that platform ...
Did not pre X versions of Mac OS have more viruses in the wild with much smaller market share?
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Well, it does have to get the user's permission to install it first... From the F-Secure site: http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/trojan-downloader_osx_flashb... On execution, the malware will prompt the unsuspecting user for the administrator password. Whether or not the user inputs the administrator password, the malware will attempt to infect the system, though entering the password will affect how the infection is d…
Did you even read the page you linked or the text you pasted? It specifically states that the malware will infect the machine even if the user does not give permission.
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The problem is that viruses don't relate to the architecture - otherwise linux and *bsd (on the x86 platform) would have also been windows-like with their malware. I know I'm playing semantic games here, but so is Apple with this slogan :)
In the context of Apple's "Mac vs PC" campaign, does anyone seriously have doubt about what they mean by a PC?
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They're implying that only PCs have viruses.
No, they are stating that Macs are not susceptible to PC viruses, which is true. They are implying that viruses are a severe problem on PCs that Mac users do not face. This was undoubtedly true when they were running those adverts.
It's actually kind of fun when I occasionally get a virus. I always remove them by hand, piece by piece, and tracking them down is a learning experience. It's also amusing seeing some of the clever tricks they pull. Maybe it's time to get a Mac?
What do you learn? What have you ever done with that knowledge?
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Windows is now better? What the fuck. You do realize this is Java exploit, and that recent versions of OS X don't even ship with Java. And on top of that this "malware" asks user for their admin password to install itself. And on top of that if you have dev tools or any of the popular system monitoring utilities it gives up! Contrast that with typical Windows situation where no user cooperation is required to get inf…
Cool down, turbo, he's saying that Windows has improved from what it was in previous versions, not that Windows is better than OS X (the horror!)
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Cool down, turbo, he's saying that Windows has improved from what it was in previous versions, not that Windows is better than OS X (the horror!)
He's also edited his post to make it less ambiguous.