[Ti] i386 viruses

[Chris Olson]

On Nov 23, 2005, at 4:16 PM, Ian Collier wrote:

> Of course, if the move to Intel results in a _hugely_ greater  
> market share for OS X (which I doubt) then of course OS X may  
> become more attractive to virus writers.

It may not too.  With the root account disabled by default on Mac OS  
X, only viruses/worms that take advantage of social engineering  
(trick a user into supplying an admin password) would be largely  
successful.  The overall number of patched vulnerabilities in core  
Darwin components are quite low, and being an open source development  
model are better than 98% of the time going to be discovered and  
patched long before an exploit exists in the wild.  Windows simply  
doesn't have this advantage.

The majority of successful viruses/worms rely on being able to modify  
critical system components with malicious code to open back doors or  
firewall ports so it can propagate, and/or load a daemon/binary at  
boot time.

By no means impossible on OS X, just harder to make it work.
-- 
Chris

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