[Ti] Off_Topic: Are there OSX viruses?

[David DelMonte]

I've been curious about this for a while. I often get messages from 
ISP's indicating that a message supposedly sent by me contained a 
virus. I usually dont know the recipient. I was wondering whether:

a: I have been a virus carrier,

b: the messages from these ISPs are spoofs, or

c: my account is being spoofed.

As a .mac user I have the latest Virex and I run it often on my entire 
systems and at startup as a shield.

Anyone else get this?

David


On May 19, 2004, at 6:11 PM, Kynan Shook wrote:

> No, there really aren't any OS X virii.  There are a few trojans 
> (including the proof of concept MP3 trojan from a month or two ago - 
> just showing that you could disguise an application as an MP3 file; 
> also an AppleScript trojan masquerading as an Office 2004 Public Beta 
> installer that runs rm -rf ~ I believe, deleting your entire home 
> directory), but nothing that has been able to spread itself, AFAIK.  
> Most of those things are just social engineering, nothing more.  If 
> you go to a place like Network Associates (the makers of Virex) and do 
> a search for Mac in their virus database, most of what comes up is 
> Office Macros (for Windows, not Mac), and then a few old Mac virii.  
> You know, the ones that say "requires OS 4.1 or higher to run" and 
> things like that.  There's also the old Autostart worm for the Mac, 
> but that's about the most recent real threat that I can remember.
> Search for yourself:
> http://www.networkassociates.com/us/security/vil.htm
>
> khyber courchesne <courchesne at onebox.com> writes:
>> Hello, I just wanted to ask if there are indeed OSX viruses.  I 
>> thought
>> there were none, yet we have Virex sitting over there in the corner.  
>> Just
>> wanted to settle a running discussion with the people in my graphics
>> department:  every time something goes wrong with a machine (kernel 
>> panic,
>> slow file transfer, etc) somebody invariably says, "it must be a 
>> virus!"
>> while everyone else nods in sympathy.
>>
>> I know I could have posted this on lots of other more pertinent 
>> discussion
>> boards, but the Ti list seems to me to have the best ratio of ACTUAL 
>> expert
>> knowledge / probability of flame war.