In article ,
Sam Wormley wrote:
Paul Schlyter wrote:

In article ,
John Steinberg wrote:
Jon Isaacs wrote:

Here's a nice link:

http://antivirus.about.com/cs/macintoshthreats/

What's nice about it? There are no Mac OS X threats (other than
clueless PC users, careless programmers and a behemoth in Redmond that
can spend many months creating a single critical patch.) None, Jon. No
malware of any consequence for OS X.

People who are religious zealots about their favourite computers are
amusing -- up to a point....

The reason there are relatively few threats to OS X is that it has
fairly few users. If it should become a mainstream OS, then it
would be just as intensely targeted by virus authors as Windows is
today.

Hi Paul--There is the implied assumption that Linux, Unix and Mac OS X
have just as many vulnerabilities as NT and Windows....

What's the difference between "NT" and "Windows" ? Doesn't NT belong
to the WIndows family of OS'es?

Anyway, that's your interpretation and not my assumption. I believe
Unix and their clones have fewer vulnerabilities, but not zero
vulnerabilities as some people seem to want to believe. But let me
put it this way: of all these OS'es, Windows is definitely the one
which had had the most severe "field test", because it's the most
targeted OE'es by the virus authors. Therefore the Windows
vulnerabilities are the most exposed. And users of other OS'es tend
to be overly optimistic about the lack of vulnerabilities of their
OS. And should their pet OS become as popular as they'd wish, I
believe they might get a shock when vulnerabilities in these OS'es
started to be revealed.

I'm not sure that that is the case. Granted all operating systems
have vulnerabilities, but I'd like to see some statistics that
show the others are no better than Microsoft.

I've been in the UNIX/Linux/OS X environment since 1989... have been
part of the cyber wars... I seem much more secure than my Microsoft
colleagues and friends.

-Sam

You'd probably be just as secure if you used plain MS-DOS: hardly
anyone uses it anymore, and even fewer write malicious code for it.

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