Mac Virus

[Rachael]

When you think your platform is immune, or generally just unattractive enough not to attract viruses, complacency sets in... and...

https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/0 ... for-years/

Let's just be glad this nasty piece of software isn't rogueware, this time around.

[Graf Zahl]

I have lost count how often I entered a discussion about malware on non-Windows systems and nearly everybody on Mac and Linux arrogantly dismissing it as "Windows gets infected because it's so insecure." and of course "We do not need protection because our OSs cannot be infected."

Well, I cannot say I am surprised. What's scary here is that this seems to be some really old thing. One has to wonder what modern malware creators are doing on these systems then. It should be clear that Macs are very tempting targets - mostly being used by more affluent users with a mostly non-existent sense for security.

[Dancso]

This isn't exactly the first time macs have seen a major hit either.
Viruses are of course gravitating towards the most popular platforms because the more users it infects, the greater the potential for (monetary) gain.

Macs aren't exactly uncommon, so it almost comes as a surprise that we don't hear about major threats more often, especially considering that lots of people choose it with the expectation of simplicity, which likely leads to no security measures being taken.

[Rachael]

Yeah this is pretty much what happens when you think you're immune to viruses just because you use Mac or Linux.

On the all and whole Linux isn't really even that secure, unless the end-user knows what they're doing, and a lot of them do not. And some people think that as long as you compile your own code (which is standard practice on Linux, to be quite honest), you have nothing to worry about - that is only true if you actually thoroughly review the code *before* you compile it. In fact, the "Make" command itself exposes a potentially huge attack vector on its own on the very merits of running any arbitrary commands in the scripts that you might not be aware the scripts are calling.

The *only* thing giving Mac and Linux users a free pass right now, unfortunately, is the large percentage of people still using Windows. If it were something like 50-30-20 win-mac-linux, there would be a lot more malware for the other two. Just as DOS viruses stopped appearing when people started using 98 and XP, so did malware authors focus their attention more on what is most used. Nothing is out of reach for malware authors, though.

[ibm5155]

Just use social enginering with Linux, add a torrent file saying it's a leaked of an abandoned exe file from doom 4 that were meant to run on ubuntu, ask the user to run this file with sudo and tadah, you can do anything you want...
Or be like google and explore hardware "bugs" (like Project Zero did) where you don't even need a sudo call to be in god level.

EDIT: And it's also funny that people from Linux world Always love to not count android as Linux so their vírus count is low

[Nash]

I'm surprised that Mac OS isn't rampant with viruses, I mean that's what all the hipsters and the celebs use... it's a goldmine of bank accounts, nudes and other private data that people would die to get their hands on...

[wildweasel]

I'm surprised that Mac OS isn't rampant with viruses, I mean that's what all the hipsters and the celebs use... it's a goldmine of bank accounts, nudes and other private data that people would die to get their hands on...

Nah, the malware folks seem to be more interested in targeting iPhones and Apple-specific user accounts like iTunes and iCloud.

[DaMan]

The greatest trick malware ever pulled was convincing macolytes it didn't exist.