[msb0014]

Is the Mac OS (Unix) less prone to viruses and attacks than a PC because:

1. Hackers cannot crack the Mac.

2. Hackers would rather attack a system with 95-97% of users out there.

What is the truth out there?

On my work PC I get .exe, .zip emails that are obviously malicious. When on my Mac at home and work I have yet (over 10 years on a Mac) to get an attachment that would obviously be a virus or worm.

Matt

[UpQuark]

To answer your question directly yes and no.

If your password to log on to Mac is pretty simple, you can get hacked, but you have to have ports open to do so - ala SSH, Apache, file sharing etc.

OS X is a bit more secure, inherently due to compartimentation and lack of registry and lack of viruses written for OSX (linux as well)

The registry in windows binds all accounts together. If you hack the right key, you can affect all accounts on that box.

In OS X (linux too) each account stands on it's own (to a degree). And you must know the root password to really mess stuff up.

So, the 'no' part is if there is a virus written for OS X and you download it and 'run it', it could conceivibly mess up your stuff... But it won't mess up the system to the degree that my.doom did for windows users.

THe caviate is that if you log in as root and that is your account - (Akin to having admin rights in windows) and you run the malicious code, your system will be damaged.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by msb0014

1. Hackers cannot crack the Mac.

It's the core of OS X, Unix, that provides a much safer environment.

Originally Posted by msb0014

2. Hackers would rather attack a system with 95-97% of users out there.

That, too. The different proof of concepts show that there are some ways to eexploit Macs.

BUT: never remotely, always only with physical access, or with the help of a user that enters his password without knowing / thinking what he / she is doing.

-t

[mitchell_pgh]

My little nugget of info:

While our platform of choice may only have 3% of the PC market, many of the foundation technologies are used by a much larger user base. Look at Apache... it has a user base almost twice that of Windows:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/20...er_survey.html

Because OS X is essentially "just another Unix" Apple has the luxury of implementing some of the most secure and heavily tested services.

[finite]

http://www.cheapwarezsoftware.com

[mitchell_pgh]

Originally Posted by turtle777

It's the core of OS X, Unix, that provides a much safer environment.


BUT: never remotely, always only with physical access, or with the help of a user that enters his password without knowing / thinking what he / she is doing.

-t

There is really no way to defeat Trojans without saying goodbye to an easy to use GUI. I think Apple walks the line VERY well.

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by msb0014

Is the Mac OS (Unix) less prone to viruses and attacks than a PC because:

1. Hackers cannot crack the Mac.

2. Hackers would rather attack a system with 95-97% of users out there.

What is the truth out there?

Yes. Or rather, both and neither. OK, so I'm not being terribly helpful, but the point is that there's some truth to both statements, but neither is completely true.

Macs have always been much harder to crack than Windows machines; it was true of the old "Classic" architecture, and it remains true in OSX. OS9 was difficult to crack simply because there was no way to legitimately access the machine over the network; you were dealing with a sealed box, but also throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Anyone who changed this situation left themselves open to vulnerabilities, and hacks were made for such situations. If a user could get into the machine, he had carte blance to do whatever he wanted; the result was not unlike Windows in that aspect. However, the problem of initially getting into the system was so difficult that these were few and far between. Most hacks required physical access to the machine, but if you had this then the hacks were trivial to perform; there wasn't even a password to deal with. All you needed was a minute or two of not being watched closely and you could do almost anything.

OSX, in contrast to OS9, has legitimate ways of accessing the system remotely, though these tend to be of higher quality code-wise than the corresponding OS9 programs and so fewer holes turn up there. However, aside from this, OSX also has a decent security model in place, so that even if a hacker gets onto the system the damage he can do is limited. Couple this with Apple's rapid response to the issues which do pop up, and you get a system which is almost as difficult to hack into as OS9, and actually getting in is not the only thing a cracker has to be able to do before he can do damage. If you turn off the networking services in the Sharing control panel, then in fact OSX is even harder to get into than OS9, because physical access still presents at least a couple of barriers (easy to overcome if you're not being watched and you can steal the hard drive, but this presents its own challenges).

Windows fails this on both counts. By default, Windows ships with several methods of getting into the machine, and while most of these have legitimate uses they don't take adequate measures to keep malicious users out. This is particularly true of ActiveX, which has made entirely new classes of malware possible because of its braindead approach to security, but there are other problematic "features" as well. As for the security model, Windows NT (and Windows XP, by extension) actually ship with a very good model, but they don't bother to use it. Almost every aspect of the security model which would actually make any difference is disabled by default in the name of "convenience".

As for the security-by-obscurity claim which you mention -that hackers would rather attack a large monoculture- there is some truth for this, and we have benefited to some degree. However, hackers get into "the scene" for many reasons, and not all of them have to do with easy hacks or hacks which can target large numbers of people. Some hackers are in it for a challenge; they want to do hacks which are difficult or have never been done before. The author of Melissa, the first e-mail worm (which, of course, only affected Microsoft products) was one of these. Consider also the case of Code Red, the first worm to spread through Web servers; this only affected Microsoft's IIS, which only runs on some 15% of Web servers even today. The marketshare for IIS is small, but it presented a kind of hack which had never been done in this way before, and its author was out for glory.

No one has yet hacked OSX, except for the usual Trojan-horse junk that every OS has. There is considerable glory to be had for the first person to do this, particularly if they do so in a way which makes Microsoft look particularly good. Someday it will happen; Macs are not, after all, invincible. But it has not happened yet, and obscurity is not the only reason for that.

[romeosc]

Originally Posted by finite

http://www.cheapwarezsoftware.com

That is a way to get a Trojan, since you have to give Admin. Password to install illegal software!


I heard of someone who downladed Tiger and installed and all it did was wipe harddrive. It asked permission to run!

[loki74]

I would like to quote what Millinium said:

Almost every aspect of the security model which would actually make any difference is disabled by default in the name of "convenience".

And therin lies the quandary. For all the efforts Windows makes to create a "convenient" environmet, it is massively clunky. Alerts that tell you time and time again that the Taskbar is "Hiding your inactive icons" or "Your computer might be at risk" waste your time, all the time. Every coputer might be at risk. Instead of slowing the user down over trivial things, it should alert the user when something serious is happening. Like unkown programs sending and recieving messages, or unkown programs modifying the registry. Essentially, Windows had made everything quick where it should slow down and get some user input, and demands user input where it is obviously unnecessary.

Ok, now that I'm done dissing Windows , I think the two biggest things that make OSX so secure are: You need to enter the admin password from the workstation to install anything. This means the hacker has to have physical access or damn good social enginerring skills. Secondly, there is no registry type thing, that as mentioned in an earlier post "binds" all the users together.

I think that the biggest worry for a Mac user virus wise is hackers with very big egoes who are out for glory and are very very skilled social engineers. Though very rare, they are out there...

[ghporter]

Windows suffers because even though it is made up of numerous (innumerable?) modules, they are all interdependent, so a hole in one is a hole in the entire OS. By contrast, the Unix OSs are truly modular, and while those modules interact, they are not nearly as interdependent as are the parts of Windows, so a hole in one Unix module is just that-and that makes it much easier to review and correct before it ever ships, much easier to patch, and much easier to isolate when and if a problem occurs.

With all that said, I must point out that no software can ever be perfect. This is a mathematical truth that has nothing to do with brand loyalty-it is absolutely impossible to craft code that is completely without error or flaw. There are deficiencies-I wouldn't call them holes-in EVERY Unix and Unix-like OS, and it's just a matter of time before the baddies identify and exploit them.

I see a lot of people posting on MacNN who are smug about the Mac being "immune" to any and all viruses. Sure, Macs are immune to Windows viruses. But Macs are NOT permanently immune to any and all viruses. The nature of MacOS development has meant that it is tighter and overall better crafted (none of that pesky "what if a user wants to run this new version on an 80186 with 4MB of RAM?" backward compatibility BS), but it is still a man-made thing and thus still less than perfect.

[Big Mac]

And it is only a matter of time before there are a number of OS X viruses, it's only logical to assume. The classic Mac OS had a number of viruses over its lifetime, despite its small market share.

[GreyArea]

Mac OS X certainly isn't impossible to crack, but it's probably harder that it's worth - possibly *much* harder. One of the big plusses in Unix systems is that files aren't made executable simply because of what their filename is. On a Windows box a file is executable simply by having .exe, .com or .bat as its extension. This makes placing a rogue executable in the system much easier.