MacNews

by Eric Blomberg

Well, the flu season is upon us and with all those viruses floating around I thought we should look at your Mac catching one.

“But Macs don't get viruses”. Not true. All operating systems are vulnerable to getting sick including Macs. What you need to understand is Macs don't get Windows viruses and Windows PCs don't get Mac viruses. While you can't get a PC virus you are however capable of transferring one. I will be explaining and examining the basic bad stuff out there and include some advice on how to keep your Mac healthy. Sorry old timers, but this article is meant for Mac OS X. Before I get started, if you are experiencing problems with a Mac, please don't assume that is a virus. I have seen many users go out and buy Norton AntiVirus only to discover all they had was a corrupted .plist (preference file) or some other easily correctable condition. 

What is a computer virus?

Actually there are several nasty things that get lumped together as “viruses”. Malware, short for malicious software, is created to sneak into your computer and operate without your consent. Malware could be as simple as reporting your favorite websites to taking your computer down. Trojan horses, viruses, worms, adware, spyware, rootkits and macros fall under the category of malware. 

A trojan horse or trojan comes from Greek mythology where the people of Troy rolled this huge wooden horse into their city only to later discover it was housing Greek soldiers. That is exactly what a trojan horse does. A trojan pretends to be some useful/essential plugin or a great free game when in reality, it is designed to do harmful things to your computer. 

A computer virus is like a regular virus that travels from one person to another, only it spreads its bad code from one computer to another. Typically these are transferred via email, networks, Internet, USB drives, CDs, DVDs and dare I say floppy disks. 

Worms differ from viruses in that they don't require attachment to a program, but just spread from the host computer. 

Adware is just what it sounds like, advertisements that run on your computer after software was installed. 

Just like real world spies, Spyware is meant to be hidden from the computer user and secretly monitors the users actions or even gathers personal data. There also is commercial Spyware which is intentionally installed to covertly observe the actions of the user. Typically these are utilized to check that John is doing his work and not playing online poker.

Rootkit come from the Unix term Root which is a high level user. Rootkits are one or more programs targeted to conceal themselves from the user and undermine the operating system.

Macros take advantage of Microsoft Word's macro language which is used to automate actions, to infect your Word files.

So how vulnerable are the Macs? 

Continue reading »