On April 07 2012 05:09 Reaper9 wrote: And my family friends wanted me to get a Mac. Guess their want of attention has finally attracted the virus makers. @ LoLAdriankat,thanks for clarifying
i definitely find it funny how knee-jerk a lot of these responses are.
person 1: "woah mac got ONE trojan. obviously can't buy a system that can be easily compromised."
person 2: "windows gets trojans all the time."
person 1: "yeah but you just have to protect yourself and buy security software. no big deal."
person 2: -.-
It's not so knee jerk when they literally say my computer is a piece of junk. My cousins too. Fine, I get your hardware is superior to mine, but I weighed the cost and benefits of getting a Mac, and I still want to stick with windows. If they kept chanting it like a mantra in your ear every time the topic of computers was mentioned, I'm sure you'd get extremely annoyed too. One of their main arguements was "it can't get malware or viruses."
I'm confused, you could get a Mac that's better than a PC for equal money? Did you buy at the most expensive store ever, or am I missing something?
On April 07 2012 05:09 Reaper9 wrote: And my family friends wanted me to get a Mac. Guess their want of attention has finally attracted the virus makers. @ LoLAdriankat,thanks for clarifying
i definitely find it funny how knee-jerk a lot of these responses are.
person 1: "woah mac got ONE trojan. obviously can't buy a system that can be easily compromised."
person 2: "windows gets trojans all the time."
person 1: "yeah but you just have to protect yourself and buy security software. no big deal."
person 2: -.-
It's not so knee jerk when they literally say my computer is a piece of junk. My cousins too. Fine, I get your hardware is superior to mine, but I weighed the cost and benefits of getting a Mac, and I still want to stick with windows. If they kept chanting it like a mantra in your ear every time the topic of computers was mentioned, I'm sure you'd get extremely annoyed too. One of their main arguements was "it can't get malware or viruses."
I'm confused, you could get a Mac that's better than a PC for equal money? Did you buy at the most expensive store ever, or am I missing something?
He is probably talking about hardware quality, not hardware specs. Everyone knows Macs are a joke when it comes to price/performance, but the build quality on their Macbooks is something to at least bear in mind. The desktops however IMO are inferior to a custom-built PC desktop in literally every way.
Wow apple haters out in force. Apple does not claim that macs are immune from viruses. It just is way more likely to get one on a Windows computer. From what I remember of setting up my grandmas laptop a year or two ago they recommended free antivirus
On April 07 2012 05:09 Reaper9 wrote: And my family friends wanted me to get a Mac. Guess their want of attention has finally attracted the virus makers. @ LoLAdriankat,thanks for clarifying
i definitely find it funny how knee-jerk a lot of these responses are.
person 1: "woah mac got ONE trojan. obviously can't buy a system that can be easily compromised."
person 2: "windows gets trojans all the time."
person 1: "yeah but you just have to protect yourself and buy security software. no big deal."
person 2: -.-
It's not so knee jerk when they literally say my computer is a piece of junk. My cousins too. Fine, I get your hardware is superior to mine, but I weighed the cost and benefits of getting a Mac, and I still want to stick with windows. If they kept chanting it like a mantra in your ear every time the topic of computers was mentioned, I'm sure you'd get extremely annoyed too. One of their main arguements was "it can't get malware or viruses."
I'm confused, you could get a Mac that's better than a PC for equal money? Did you buy at the most expensive store ever, or am I missing something?
He is probably talking about hardware quality, not hardware specs. Everyone knows Macs are a joke when it comes to price/performance, but the build quality on their Macbooks is something to at least bear in mind. The desktops however IMO are inferior to a custom-built PC desktop in literally every way.
100% agree if your getting a tower build a windows yourself. For laptops there is something to be said for Apples build quality.
On April 07 2012 16:14 Hokay wrote: Pretty wack that people are happy us mac owners are getting malware. :[
I think the reason they are happy has more to do with them having more information at their disposal to discourage their friends considering purchasing a mac who are basing their purchase on rampant misinformation that apple's marketing department and many of apples more computer illiterate supporters seem so willing to spread.
Nice wake-up call to Mac owners. Just because virus authors target the majority of the population, doesn't mean you are immune.
This would be a non-story if I hadn't personally experienced so many MAC-users say to me that I was unduly exposing myself to so many exploitations by operating a PC. Well, wake up and smell the coffee. Hackers attempting to profit from security vulnerabilities affects all computer owners. I'm hoping this scare catalyzes others to timely update their systems and practice safe habits.
People are stupid. Back when macs first started advertising that they couldn't get "viruses" people found many ways to execute simple shellcode injections through many of their basic processes. The issue was that it was far more worth your time to make and deliver one for windows as its much easier to get a windows machine through simple propagation of your virus.
Anyways the key figure here is that I could make a mac "Virus" back in 2005 the fact that the general public is just catching on now is hilarious. I remember spending more time in my high school computer programming class making remote rootkits for macs than actually focusing on the lesson. I also read someone earlier posted that mac is more secure and you can't fuck it up by changing 1 registry code, that's a laughable joke because you can simply delete a key start up process and render the computer just as obsolete and require another os install, except you can't do that on a mac.
Mac is quite frankly a watered down unix, but without the openness to fix your own problems that comes with unix. At least with windows if you really are incompetent and fuck it up you can simply reinstall windows over your fucked up installation and be fine and if you are somewhat computer literate you can easily close and remove a trojan on your own, where Macs is in such control freak mode (who wouldn't be when all you did was rip unix off for your operating system) that they won't allow you to do that.
Anyways the dangers of this false sense of security is what is the problem anyways since if you use simple settings you won't have to worry about anything anyways. The main use for a "virus" nowadays is usually a keylogger to see if they can grab an account to a video game or something similar and these can usually check the registry for usernames if you can save them.
However anyone who is more than a script kiddie or an overly protective parent will use a remote admin trojan so that they can install botnet software which basically is a process that is named closely after a normal operating process or even injected into it perhaps that basically connects them to an IRC channel and waits for commands. Upon receiving a command it usually results in your computer and any other infected computer pinging an ip address over and over and over which will result in any legitimate in or outbound requests taking forever to process as well as putting a gigantic strain on the processor which can cause them to melt from overheating and possibly starting a fire. This is how crew like anonymous are able to take down websites through massive amounts of ping spams.
However that is still merely how a script kiddie operates, anyone who is smart will scout the website out first and look for a search function (or a similar function that is demanding of the processor of the server), then again use the botnet to send tons of requests to the server which will again cause an overload.
However if you want to go one step further you can check out the software the board is using (assuming its public software like vbulletin or phpbb or some CMS system) and scour the code for vulnerabilities and then use every bot to attack the vulnerabilites. To put this into perspective a vulnerability in the code of an application is the kind of stuff that makes your entire computer lockup, and can allow shellcode to be injected. A single computer can crash a server with a Denial of Service exploit, but imagine if you had 100 computers doing this simultaneously or what about 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000?
The last sort of use for a compromised computer is obviously to do the dirty work for you. Instead of using your Ip or using a proxy (which makes shit take forever to load) why not just get this bot or zombie to do it for you, it leaves no traceable link. This is how credit card fraud is usually done, they get your infected PC to do all of their buying for them and get all of their stuff sent to a public place or an abandoned house and nobody can find out who did it or even have enough proof to convict them if they did.
I went of on a bit of a tangent but that's why I feel like mac is irresponsible when they advertise that they can't get viruses because that ultimately leads their users to become accomplices to crimes and potentially even become falsely accused of crimes. I just wish more people in the cyber security business knew what they were doing and didn't simply have a stupid title that meant the installer of useless firewalls and easily backdoored networking. For example someone hacked into NASA network in 2005 by going to each individual computer on their intranet and seeing if the admin on that computer had a password and some of the computers didn't then hopped over trusted networks and THIS IS A GOVERNMENT AGENCY.
Hmm. My family favored macs when I was growing up, so I've had a good amount of experience on both mac & PC. In any case, just in response to some posts here, I don't think us mac users think "no macs can gt viruses"...that's illogical. It's not like macs have special virus shields, with magic. It's just that less people used to own macs, so developers of viruses and that sort of shit had no incentive to waste their time prying into mac owners' stuff. Now there are a lot of mac users doing a lot more stuff on the web, so it makes sense that eventually some bigger viruses make their way into the mac realm.
The mac users telling people that mac doesn't get viruses are kind of cutting corners. Here is what Apple actually has on their site:
It doesn’t get PC viruses.
A Mac isn’t susceptible to the thousands of viruses plaguing Windows-based computers. That’s thanks to built-in defenses in Mac OS X that keep you safe, without any work on your part.
Of course it doesn't get PC viruses, as they are aimed at Windows computers =____= 'Built-in defenses' my ass, that's just because it's unix based.
It also gives users a false sense of security, which makes them in turn not actively take good security measures. And there isn't much they can do once they do get hit, I think.
On April 07 2012 16:14 Hokay wrote: Pretty wack that people are happy us mac owners are getting malware. :[
I think the reason they are happy has more to do with them having more information at their disposal to discourage their friends considering purchasing a mac who are basing their purchase on rampant misinformation that apple's marketing department and many of apples more computer illiterate supporters seem so willing to spread.
Rampant misinformation?
"Is a Mac safe from PC viruses? Yes. The OS X operating system isn’t susceptible to the thousands of viruses plaguing Windows-based computers. And although no computer connected to the Internet is completely immune to all viruses and spyware, OS X has built-in defenses designed with your safety in mind. The Mac web browser, Safari, alerts you whenever you’re downloading an application — even if it’s disguised as a picture or movie file. And Apple continually makes free security updates available for Mac owners. You can even have them download automatically."
This is exactly the quote from Apple.com. How is this misinformation? People's rampant hating on both Macs and Windows is absolutely stupid. I'm posting this from a Macbook Pro that's running a Window's partition. People should use whatever system is best for their needs.
On April 07 2012 20:21 Fryght wrote: The mac users telling people that mac doesn't get viruses are kind of cutting corners. Here is what Apple actually has on their site:
A Mac isn’t susceptible to the thousands of viruses plaguing Windows-based computers. That’s thanks to built-in defenses in Mac OS X that keep you safe, without any work on your part.
Of course it doesn't get PC viruses, as they are aimed at Windows computers =____= 'Built-in defenses' my ass, that's just because it's unix based.
It also gives users a false sense of security, which makes them in turn not actively take good security measures. And there isn't much they can do once they do get hit, I think.
Of course everyone should take the ordinary security measures, and this is one thing Apple should def promote more.
I have had a mac laptop for 4 years now because I was forced to buy one for university (literally that model from shop X... yeah lame).
-Can't put things on my external HD from it because of the format --- tells me it's a read only device (NTFS because I store large files on it; mac doesn't like that) -Optical drive is broken despite me having used it like 1 time total, and my mac mostly just sitting on a table never being touched 99% of the time. -It cost me about 3x what a PC would've cost for the same specs (and these days the price difference would be like 5x, it's a bad mac). -It does it's job decently as far as reading word files, pdf and ppt... that's about all I can say though. All the useful programs I use for windows (music players, etc) are either replaced by worse versions for mac or unexistant. It's sad when I have trouble playing music and videos (flv) on a freaking computer. -Can't use it for fun during trips because the only games that fucking work on it are SNES roms pretty much.
So yeah, to all those defending macs, there's really no reason. I HAVE both. It's just a popularity/hipster thing in my honest opinion; macs are worthless to anyone making real use of their computer beyond doing work in microsoft office; and that's a microsoft program.
So it started as a flash exploit, and then moved on to Java. Software prejustuce CONFIRMED!
It's sad when I have trouble playing music and videos (flv) on a freaking computer.
Try using VLC, it will literally play anything. Its very true that itunes sucks, so just dont use it.
'Built-in defenses' my ass, that's just because it's unix based.
Not true as it turns out. OSX has built in and auto-updating virus definitions via ClamAV (which is a great AV system).
Since this thread has turned into a mac vs windows ragefest (as ALL threads that have the word mac turn into), Im just going to throw in my 2 cents. Ive spent the last 8 months reaserching and writing rootkit software to attack windows (not because Im some haxxor, but because system architecture is fun to fuck with), and let me just say that attacking a fully patched windows machine is pretty damn easy. I could teach you how to get root access on any PC you come across in about an hour, but attacking a mac is a LOT more difficult.
-Can't put things on my external HD from it because of the format --- tells me it's a read only device (NTFS because I store large files on it; mac doesn't like that)
'Built-in defenses' my ass, that's just because it's unix based.
Not true as it turns out. OSX has built in and auto-updating virus definitions via ClamAV (which is a great AV system).
Since this thread has turned into a mac vs windows ragefest (as ALL threads that have the word mac turn into), Im just going to throw in my 2 cents. Ive spent the last 8 months reaserching and writing rootkit software to attack windows (not because Im some haxxor, but because system architecture is fun to fuck with), and let me just say that attacking a fully patched windows machine is pretty damn easy. I could teach you how to get root access on any PC you come across in about an hour, but attacking a mac is a LOT more difficult.
I feel like this statement is disingenuous, attacking a mac is "harder" only because of a lack of software that you can look for memory to inject shellcode into. The shellcode is out for any platform and is the actual attack, its just finding a way in. Also the statement is disingenuous because there are much more of the basic platform processes that are vulnerable to shellcode injections and Denial of Service attacks than on a windows machine.