Malware Targets Macs

[LP-Trel]

The PCWorld article is pretty interesting, but for the most part this malware is made up of trojans that take advantage of people willing to give their password to a malicious application.

I say wake me up when Linux/FreeBSD/OS X see a self replicating virus capable of spreading without user intervention.
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[Xtreme $niper]

Agreed. For the time being, viruses are really only able to spread between Macs if the user is dumb enough to enter their root password when the prompt comes up. Granted, there are a lot of newbies buying Macs these days (converting from Windows), so I wouldn't put it past them to fall for a simple thing like that, but for the most part if people are educated enough to know that there are security reasons for them having to enter their password, then things should be fine.
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[linuxdoctor]

Never discount peoples' stupidity. A hundred years ago a guy by the name of Barnum said, nobody went bankrupt underestimating other peoples' intelligence.

This is easily shown by the fact that there are plenty of people who fall for many e-mail scams that sucker people in all the time. There will be people out there who fall for the same kind of scam regardless of whether they run a Mac or a Linux box. Another oft quoted Barnum saying is, there is a sucker born every minute, and two to take him.

Even otherwise intelligent people can do stupid things. A good example of that is the compromise of the Fedora repositories last August because one of the administrators responsible for package maintenance didn't password protect his SSL key used to sign RPM packages. This could potentially have caused the release of compromised software directly from Fedora and because the servers were also shared with Redhat proper, Redhat software could also have been compromised.

While the intrusion was quickly discovered and no software was compromised it necessitated Fedora (and presumably Redhat also) to audit every server and every package on those servers and to create a new set of signing keys and resign every package in all of the Fedora repositories. That was a big problem created by a stupid mistake make by an ostensibly intelligent person.

It was worse for Microsoft more than a decade ago when the company actually shipped versions of WIndows 98 with a virus in the software directly from the factory. This was worse because these packages shipped, ended up in stores and was purchased by consumers.

These, of course, are extreme examples but, as you can see, they have happened and are likely to happen again. Everybody can do stupid things and sometimes they pay dearly for it.
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