viruses

True or False: Mac OS X Panther is not affected by viruses. Could someone give me some insight on virus vulnerabilities in panther?
Another Mac question is gcc installed by default in Panther???


Thanks

I belive it has the same/similar issues that Unix does because of their sameness.. Lol

-Cheers-

Yes its true: In its two years of service, there are no viruses for MAC OS X Panther. That doesn't mean that there wont be, so using an antivirus on it, is still recommended.

Quote:

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First, the Mac OS X operating system is built on Unix, an industrial-strength operating system used in business, science and education. And OS X doesn't enable users -- or hackers who hijack user accounts -- to alter certain core files and features of its Unix underpinnings. By contrast, Windows XP users are given "full administrator" privileges that viruses and hackers can usurp to do damage.

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read the whole article: http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20031023.html

Quote:

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Panther has synced with FreeBSD 5, and has incorporated gcc 3.3 as its default compiler

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Here's a review on the Panther OS: http://www.macwrite.com/criticalmass...d-mac-os-x.php

There are at present two viruses which have been written specifically for Mac OS X, these are:

http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/anal...simpsonsa.html
http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/anal...plsfromra.html

Both of these viruses were pretty usless when it came to actually doing anything, but they did bring forward some interesting ideas.
Trojans are something that could be written for OS X very easily as its more down to the user having to actually run the file. So user error is more to blame with trojans, and considering there are something in the range of a little under a thousand viruses for unix/linux of which some would run effectively on OS X, and some which would partly run and probably do more damage than they were meant to in the first place because of the changes in Darwin.
Worms however will be something that will be very few and far between for OS X. I cannot think of any method apart from things like 'Apple Remote Events' and 'ssh' which would allow a program to install itself to a Mac, but this could change.
At present Mac is a secure platform because no one is writing any viruses for it, but there is no reason why this could not change.
I work for an anti-virus company and of the 98+ thousand viruses that we detect something in the area of maybe 100 have anything to do with Mac specifically. At the moment Windows is the target, and in my opinion will be for a long long time to come.