Macs get viruses too
November 1st, 2007 | Published in Generativity
A lot of my recent work concerns how vulnerable the Internet is to bad code — in particular, how easily the generative PCs hooked up to it can find themselves reprogrammed for worse, in a heartbeat, either by drive-by downloads that sneak onto the machine or by code that the user affirmatively (but foolishly) asks to install.
The response to the claim that there’s a real problem here is sometimes that it’s Microsoft’s fault. For example, I endured benefited from a drubbing set of comments along these lines on Groklaw on the paper I wrote first discussing the issue.
But the fact is that (1) Macs have their own security vulnerabilities; (2) interoperability creates avenues for infection that can cross platforms; and (3) the core problem is that generative platforms — where people can choose what code to run — are all vulnerable to people being tricked into running the wrong code. For example, now there’s a fake codec floating around targeting Mac users. Being only 5% of the installed base can only go so far to help one avoid the baleful attention of malware authors!
Thus our efforts at StopBadware …
