Virus on Macintosh
 

I have never experienced a virus of any sort using Macintosh. I'd like to hear any stories of virus combat experience, anyone here a veteran or is this battle confined to the M$ world?

Jacques

I have had viruses three or four times. A couple were found on floppies given to me years ago and I don't remember the details. About three years ago, running OS 8.6, I got tired of the overhead of Virex 6 and turned it off. Then forgot about it. Several weeks later, I noticed beeping sounds at odd times. Then various sorts of odd behavior began, including some that was fairly inconvenient, like crashes. I did not lose any data, but I was frustrated enough to read one of those basic troubleshooting checklists. Near the top was "Check for virus." Sure enough, I had some form of something called an nVir virus (I think). A zillion files were infected with it including some system files. Virex 6 took care of it, and the troublesome symptoms went away. More recently, Virex 7 found a Windows virus in a (duh) Windows file on my machine, which I had never used.

I should be obvious that, in my opinion, the idea that Macintosh viruses are a myth is itself a myth, one that is believed by a surprising number of experienced users. I might add that I have never used a Microsoft mail product.

I got infected once in my old 8500 with a benign form of the '666' virus.

Spread a bit around, even to my powerbook, but I detected it early, and deleted the nice fellow from existance.


Cheers...

Back in high school, I practiced unsafe computing at the local college's computer lab and wound up with the Scores virus. (Anyone remember that one?) My poor SE/30....

There was a time when hackers liked the Mac and there were a lot of Mac virii, and I remember fighting the old ones like WDEF.

But Mac virii haven't been in vogue for years, and I haven't seen an issue with it in a long time. When people ask me now what I use for antivirus, I usually answer "MacOS and a non-Microsoft mail client". I wonder how OS X will affect that.

Once.... 14 years ago.

~Dennis

Had one of the MS Word macro viruses about 3 or four years ago.

I got nVir (A or B) back in the late 1980s on a handful of bootable floppies. Downloaded Disinfectant and got rid of it before I saw any symptoms.

About a decade later, my boss wanted me to go through a box of old floppies to see if there was anything that should be salvaged before he threw them out. I managed to acquire nVir yet again! A month or so later, on a quiet morning, I ran Disinfectant and damned if it didn't pick up buggies! Once again, no damage.

That's it for me, but we did find the Autostart worm all over among our NYC clients, and had to disinfect the machines and all the Jaz and Zip cartridges it was clinging to. Oh yeah, CDs too. Their Asian partners kept sending data on infected home-burned CDs.

I owned a cyber cafe, we saw: MS word macro viruses, 666, QuickTime AutoStartWorm, Scores, nVIR, Graphics Accelerator Virus, and a couple others.

For the most part, they were not a big deal. MS Word 6 and the Macros though.... ugh, that was ****ing hell.

Dang...
 

... just found two files infected with W97 macro viruses while sorting through some old floppies.

I've had two, one jpg downloaded from a newsgroup wiped my hd and required a hard reset and reformat. The other was a "Mac users click here" link which after connecting crashed the machine and when restarted only had the system folder visible. Norton's was able to fix the directory after a few runs and got most everything back except for a few corrupt files. Both happened in '96 on a IIci running a DayStar 40MHz 040.

The only thing in the past 5 years or so have been infected Word files. Protecting 'normal.dot' pretty much clears that up. Lots of failed Code Red attacks against Apache.

I remember WDEF and nVir from the old days. The worst was when Adobe shipped a set of infected install CD's.

And funny tricks with Talking Moose, of course. :)

When I started this job 10 years ago, they had one mac server that no one had ever maintained, which crashed repeatedly. The ITS dept. refused to maintain macs (how things have changed!) I took it down to check it out... and it had two viruses on the server, WDEF and nVIR, as well as being 40% fragmented (!)

I have only seen one Mac virus on one of my machines on 15+ years using a Mac. It was one of the benign type - I think WDEF, not sure. Never caused any damage.

Along the same lines of this polll - what are people using for virus protection in OS X? I am torn on the matter - since OS X has Unix underpinning - the possibility of virii is much more prevalent, but as stated above I have only seen one virus in my time. Also - I have tried the two major pkgs - Norton and Virex and did not really like either one much. I was a long time Virex user in pre-X days, but I just didn't feel like Virex (nor Norton) for OS X was really up to par. Also - I am convinced that both of them caused random crashes that could not be documented or attributed to anything else. I feel a bit paranoid - more so than in pre-X, and would like to at least have some virus software options - but have yet to find them.

Is there such a thing as Open Source Unix virus detection software?

Any ideas? Thoughts?

I have (and used once) VIREX since my .Mac account came with it for free.. it seeks to destroy thousands (!) of virii on every run, with no special features at all.

However this thread confirms my suspicions!

I've had my day of phreaking, hacking and pirating - back in the eighties mostly with my C-64 and later an Amiga. I dealt with all kinds of vermin in those days, practically inviting it and even collecting variations at one point!

..but..

Alot of things have changed, I compute cleanly now - from the ground up. Everything I use or download always comes from legitimate sources, eliminating alot of potential exposure to virii critter.

Besides the safe computing - no one seems to know of even one existing threat to Mac OS X in virus form (besides IE, as the polls suggest)!

Why spend time and money on virus-protection if the threat is non-existant? Perhaps things will change soon, but until then - this free Apple-provided Virex software mostly takes up space as far as I see it.

---

I'm starting to use the Fink / X11 system a bit, anyone here know of any virus threats there? Do they exist?

Jacques

UNIX Threats
 

One friend told me that UNIX has a grand total of two known viruses, no sources cited.

It seems most of the infectious code out there targets LINUX, see here.

I think anti virus programs are almost worse than a virus. I run Windows 2000, Linux and Mac OSX and wouldn't dream of istalling an anti virus program on any of them.

Then again, I wouldn't dream of running outlook or accepting word docs from strangers. I stay updated on everything, and I have yet to hear of a pdf or eudora/webmail virus.

Oh, by the way, I've never had a mac virus. I've been on the internet since OS 7 something.

1 in 5 years
 

I have managed lots of Macs over the past 5 years, only one virus. There will come a day when we get hammered though, it is just a matter of time.
-Adam

re: virus on macs
 

the last mac virus I dealt with was the auto start worm back in the early 90's and I got that from the four color printer I send work to.
I run a win2k network (60pcs and 10 macs) loaded with virus protection (pc only). I receive email from our exchange server everytime an email is stopped due to a virus. In the past month the server has detected over 200 (mostly klez h) viruses coming in. I average about 7 - 10 a day. My first day on the job here the funlove virus took the network down and crashed the exchange server. That is when I found out that my predecessor had never backed up the server and the virus protection he purchased was still in the box. I go to the symantec site at least once a day to see if it is necessary to manually update due to a new virus. I have norton for macs but have not installed it on any of the machines.

Melanie

Re: re: virus on macs
 

I ran Virex the other day on everything on my X partition. It took forever, and found 5 files that were strong enough suspect to delete. The report told me nothing about what or where they were. Everything's been running well since, but it was running that way before.