Apple to support reps: 'Don't confirm Mac infections'

Security patches aren't instant. Updating your browser helps sure, but it's not a real solution.

There is a tendency for people like us to assume every time we see someone with a malware infection that it must be because the user is a moron who: still uses Kazaa, doesn't know about the good porn sites, is browsing on IE6 and installs anything that a popup asks him too. That just isn't true.

It's not just idiots, the average non-moron windows user is massively vulnerable to malware.

In my experience (I'll limit it to friends and family b/c of the obvious selection bias of including Geek Squad customers), nearly every (non developer) windows user I know has had at least one malware infection over the last few years that required either my help, or a system restore.

To do this I checked the history for recently visited sites. Before most browsers had private browse modes, and the ability to only delete recently browsed data, a non empty history with no obvious porn listings could usually be taken at face value.

The significance of this is offset by the base rate though: unlike Windows PCs, blondes don't constitute 90% of the sample group.

I'm not saying everyone is sick though. I'm saying I've seen thousands of windows machines with malware and a lot of the time it wasn't just an uneducated user problem.

My first store was also about an hour away from the nearest mac store so I also saw a pretty fair amount of macs while working there. They came in all the time for hardware issues so obviously they aren't perfect--But I never once saw one with malware--not in 5 years.

I don't think that they are magically immune to malware and some of it can be explained by smaller market share, but whatever the reason from my experience dealing with thousands of windows pcs and hundreds of macs--malware on macs is so insignificant that it doesn't exist.

5 years ago people were saying that malware for macs was coming (In fact Best Buy was pushing AV installs for macs when we first started carrying them), but it didn't materialize.

For the average user--if you buy a windows machine you will probably have to deal with malware, but if you go with a mac the chance is so low that is virutally nonexistent.

Perhaps not with this "first generation" of OS X malware.

On Windows some malware replicate to files and have other self-preservation quirks making anti-malware software necessary.

> I think the "Geniuses" at the Apple Stores can manage.

Against simple malware, yes. When crackers start investing time and effort into their malware (like on Windows), it'll be a different case altogether.

Well yes, but lately how are these drive-by installations happening? Mostly through holes in third-party software. My concern, as a Mac user, is that there's no fundamental reason it should be any harder to attack OS X this way; it's just that up until now Windows has been a vastly more profitable target. And that is changing.

If you're a careful and conscientious user I'd honestly say you're safer on Windows at this point, because Windows is used to being attacked. It's used to defending itself against this kind of threat. You have this ecosystem of powerful antivirus programs like MSE or AntiVir that update themselves constantly, and innumerable other third-party tools such as Secunia PSI as preventative measures, and these just don't really exist on OS X yet. Windows also yet has some exploit mitigation facilities that OS X lacks, such as ASLR and kernel patch protection.

It will be a while before OS X has developed such an ecosystem of its own, and we just have to hope the adjustment period won't be too painful.

Once an OS has the attention of malware writers (even user-installed malware like this), real malware won't be far behind. Especially when you consider how much easier exploitation is on OS X than, say, Windows or Linux. It's 2011, but OS X still doesn't have useful ASLR -- supposed to be coming in 10.7, but it was also supposed to come in 10.6, so we'll see how that goes.

To you and to fellow readers of this site.

However to the average Joe, there is no difference between the terms "virus", "malware" and "my computer is now doing things that I don't like that I didn't want it to do and it's interfering with me using my computer and I can't stop it"

It is painful to watch her worry about viruses.

I find it ironic that Bott's fear mongering is leading the naive to download shady anti-virus software that is actually adware. These articles are really just contributing to the problem by misinforming people. Ed Bott is the equivalent of Glen Beck.

Neither of these things should be surprising to anyone, and hopefully the antimalware situation on OS X will improve before progressively more insidious Mac viruses are released.

Have you forgotten that Darwin is by and large derived from BSD? Apple is standing on the shoulders of giants with this one.

And I suspect MS would ship antivirus built into Windows if they could. Unfortunately, antitrust makes packaging things that make sense a non-starter if other companies sell it.

Honestly, listening to some Mac user responses to this problem, it's like entering a timewarp back to when all the measures implemented on Windows/IE to deal with this stuff hadn't even been thought up.

Possibly a quick fix, until it's addressed, is for folk on OSX to do their web surfing in a Windows VM, using a security-focussed browser designed for non-technical people, such as IE9. ;-)