[infowarrior]

Found this to work in killing off Dashboard and Widgets from within Tiger's terminal:

ps waux | grep DashboardClient | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9

You may want to automate it via cron to run every so often (including post-boot) but it's a quick-and-dirty method of keeping Dashboard from running in memory and your being vulnerable to the autoloading malicious widget exploit.

Not an elegant solution, but it does seem to work for me.

[Tesseract]

How about:

killall Dock

to restart Dashboard, or

killall -9 DashboardClient

which does exactly the same thing as your command.

[infowarrior]

Sure, that could work too. Never claimed my fix was the only one out there.

[awaspaas]

Jesus. If you never activate Dashboard, it will never use any of your memory. Why's everybody so anxious to be killing it?

[Kristoff]

Uh...that's not true.
It does occupy memory.

But, with OS X, and virtual memory, I don't see the point of messing with it either.

[awaspaas]

Okay before you do your condescending "Uh..." with me, try rebooting and see if there's anything about Dashboard in your process list. Then run Dashboard once and check again.

If you never activate Dashboard, it will never use any of your memory.