Mac OSX Security Ping!
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
Yawn. They are ever so hopeful. Rigged tests usually get the result you’re looking for.
after 28 years of never using any virus software, or being hacked, am I now supposed to worry?
using Macs to run our business, with no IT expenses, since 1982 (this li’l uneducated mom of 4 being to “go-to” girl), is it now time to get “skeered”?
Re: Anti-virus... Do you have an estimate of how many Macs are currently active on the internet? I know it's over 30,000,000, and probably over 40,000,000; has it hit 50,000,000 yet?
Reason I ask is that sooner or later the number of Macs is going to cross a threshold -- you know, that elusive magic number -- where the virus writers get interested enough to start writing viruses for OS-X, and Macs will have to start running anti-virus software.
Given that a successful botnet only requires perhaps 50,000 machines, and a million machines is considered huge, and virtually NONE of the Mac users have any anti-virus protection, and they're all running with administrative-level privilege, and they're mostly non-technical types who are NOT behind company firewalls, just cheap consumer NATs... I mean, that is such a ripe garden for picking... A thousand botnets worth of totally unprotected machines...
It puzzles me that the virus writers are so blind as to not seize that opportunity. Not one has done so, in many years of OS-X being out there in sufficient numbers. Mind-boggling.
Well, hopefully now that Charlie Miller has shown how trivial it is to crack OS-X (that was the point of the article, I think), I expect to see the new wild viruses rolling out any minute now. A dozen or so successful public in-the-wild self-replicating viruses would go a long way toward strengthening the rather weak "lack of popularity" and "security by obscurity" arguments.
Meanwhile, I now have Win7 on all my Win7 boxes in place of XP, and like it a lot -- use it all day, day after day, no reboots -- very stable. But I discovered that I still need XP for compatibility with some older apps, so I cranked up Win7's "XP Mode", which works really well -- very seamless. But then I realized I had to install antivirus in the XP-Mode guest virtual machine in addition to the antivirus in the Win7 host machine. That's a little frustrating. Two copies of anti-virus on one Windows box, and none on my Mac or Linux or Unix machines.
You know, if I worked for an anti-virus company, I'd post a reward, say $10,000 and a free Mac, to the first virus writer who uses Charlie Miller's (or any other) exploits to create and release a viable self-replicating OS-X virus. Anonymously, of course. Just to stir the pot a little, drum up some business... ya know.
Anyway, if you happen to know the number of active Macs, I'd be interested. If you want you can just FReepmail me a link or something. Thanks!