The Bitter Pill

With a new wave of highly effective (and funny) commercials touting the Macintosh’s resistance to viruses, and a new wave of critics insisting Apple is ripe for the malware writer picking, where does the truth lie? Are Macs susceptible to viruses?

Yes. No. Possibly. Probably not.

It is possible for a Mac to catch a virus, or otherwise be laid low by evil programming trickery. If one person can write some code, someone else can probably find a hole or exploit in it. And there are reports of Mac-targeting malware in the wild.

On the other hand, consider this:

• Macintoshes are based on freeBSD, a version of Unix, and take advantage of more than 30 years of heavy-duty Unix security experience in the most secure and sensitive environments imaginable.
• Many holes that are easily exploited in default Windows installations are turned off by default in OS X.
• While thousands of known bugs exist for Windows, only one or two have surfaced for Macs
• While millions of Window users have found viruses on their computers, only a couple of OS X users have seen a virus.
• While hundreds, if not thousands, of Windows viruses will allow someone to control your computer remotely, no OS X malware has surfaced that will allow anyone to do much of anything at all, let alone control your computer.
• Apple has a much better record of responding to and closing holes than Microsoft.

So could your Mac get a virus? Possibly.

Then again, it’s possible lightning could strike your house, zap the hard drive and render the whole point moot. It’s more likely, too.

Read more on Daring Fireball.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 4th, 2006 at 11:05 am and is filed under General, Geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.