Monday, June 21, 2010

Why don't MAC's have computer viruses? Or do they?

I wasent for sure because Ive dealt with some viruses in my time.



Why don't MAC's have computer viruses? Or do they?security



There are viruses and "exploits" for OSX, if you can call them that. The reason these don't work well on OSX is because of the permissions OSX and its UNIX core grant to programs running under user accounts. When you login to OSX you are not logged into an admin or as "root" as it is known in the *nix world. But you can still install applications and make changes to the system (unlike in Windows). If a virus were to get on your OSX system, it would have to request permissions to access (and does) your files and settings but when it attempts to venture into the root realm the OS comes back and says "sorry, you don't have permissions to do that" and the virus basically sits there doing nothing, perhaps being a pain but it'll sit there, twiddle its thumbs all day because OSX won't let it do anything. It would be difficult to create a devastating virus for OSX because of these permissions (unless you're daft enough to login as root on your OSX machine) and it wouldn't spread as fast because only about 5% of the entire world (maybe less) uses OSX. It's not worth a hackers time however, the exploits present in OSX are easily... ummmm, exploited and Apple has come under fire for being lackluster about security patches and updates but again, there just aren't enough Mac users to make it worth a hackers time. However now that it is possible to install Windows XP on your Mac, it has the same vulnerabilities that a regular PC would so you need to take the same security precautions there. There has also been rumors of creating a virus for Windows XP that could jump over to the OSX partition and in theory wreak havoc on it while you're logged into Windows, however, that has yet to manifest itself in any way.



Why don't MAC's have computer viruses? Or do they?trojan



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they don't bother witing them for macs because not as many people are ticked off at steve jobs like they are bill gates. :)
No one writes viruses for them, because most people don't own Macs. For a virus to spread far and wide, they target the most popular operating system on the planet, ye olde Windows...

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