Virus on Macintosh

[Jacques]

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

[hombre]

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.

[sao]

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...

[at_sym]

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....

[SunByrne]

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.

[dbhill]

Once.... 14 years ago.

~Dennis

[rusto]

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

[AHunter3]

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.

[taikahn]

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.

[hombre]

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

[Strato]

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.

[Craig R. Arko]

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. :)

[lerkfish]

Originally posted by Craig R. Arko
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 (!)

[bluehz]

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?

[Jacques]

Originally posted by bluehz
...what are people using for virus protection in OS X? I am torn on the matter...

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

[Jacques]

Originally posted by Jacques
...anyone here know of any virus threats there? Do they exist?

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 (http://antivirus.about.com/cs/unixthreats/index.htm).

[driverdave]

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.

[adam leahy]

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

[imeldesign]

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

[Phil St. Romain]

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.

[hombre]

The report told me nothing about what or where they were.

Did you have the verbose option turned on? I think that's the only way to find out the details of the putative infected files. Unfortunately, that option slows the scan down even more.

[tcascone]

The only virus I ever had on a mac was on my Power Mac 7200 back in '98. It was that annoying Word 6 virus that saved all your documents as templates. I was a college student at the time, and the college ran on Macs. That virus hit the campus like a plague. Fortunately, it wasn't a major computer killer or anything, but there were a lot of annoyed students. :rolleyes:

[logo]

In those old days of SE/30s and LCs I came across some nVir...

Never a big problem. Disinfectant was the cure!!!

[AHunter3]

It's like worrying about earthquakes or tornados in New York City. New York does occasionally get such weather, and the possibility exists that a bad one could hit some day. But it just isn't the same level of concern as earthquakes in western California or Mexico, or tornados in Mississippi or Kansas. (~ viruses on Windows PCs).

[olwylee]

About three years ago i somehow aquired the 666 virus while running OS 8.6 and it was really nasty, by the time i realized what was happening it had corrupted more then half my HD.

As for lately, I am on several mailing lists and receive up to 200 emails a day. Virex catches a virus daily from my documents folder. Although none of the viruses affect 10.1.5, it does appear that the number of viruses out there is rapidly increasing and I believe it is just a matter of time before a unix virus will surface and do some real damage to those unprotected.

[puffynet]

The only virus I ever "saw" on the Mac (since 1995) came through a Windoze email. I don't remember it's name but even if I had opened the viral attachment it would not have affected the Mac. Bottom line: never had a virus!

[innersense]

I've been wondering to myself for the last couple of months wether Virex or Norton virus software actually works...It doesnt seem to pick up any viruses even though I know there is weird virus type activity going on in my computer...

For instance...

Today I switch on my computer (G4 powerbook) with Jaguar installed. Went to the Internet Sharing control panel (where your firewall settings are etc etc) to change a few settings. Where you turn your different types of file sharing on and off I noticed another option...which isnt normally there....It began with a "C" it almost looked like it said Carrichio, or something similar, although it didnt. Underneath that it said something about "sharing for timmy, oh yes". I know this sounds really weird...but this is not normal!!! Im running norton anti virus now, however no doubt it will not pick anything up...I clicked off what it said before I could write it down...also...when i did start up my internet sharing it took longer then usual to start up.....

has anybody else experienced the same problem? I know this sounds really weird..

Regards

Innersense

[macmath]

Originally posted by innersense
Where you turn your different types of file sharing on and off I noticed another option...which isnt normally there....It began with a "C" it almost looked like it said Carrichio, or something similar, although it didnt. Underneath that it said something about "sharing for timmy, oh yes". I know this sounds really weird...but this is not normal!!!



I've read at Macintouch (http://www.macintouch.com/mosxreader10.2pt14.html) where others have seen this exact same thing. They were wondering whether or not it was an Apple Easter Egg. I believe that this ("Cupertino Sharing On", and "Lots of information for you. and you. and timmy.") is a reference to something in literature, although I can't recall what. If you go to this link, this item is near the bottom of the page. It is worth reading because it even lists the file where it is located ("/System/Library/PreferencePanes/SharingPref.prefPane/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/SharingPref.nib/objects.nib" ). It is also localized into other languages!

[jonesy]

In the five or six years I've worked as a Mac tech for our University I've come across virii mabey three times and that wass years ago. All of the virii were Office macro virii. They were virulent and spread themselves pretty good within the oaffices involed (ex. or Geology dept's Macs all got infected by one professor's machine) but I've never seen a confirmed true-to-life virus on the scale of Win virii.

Virii on the Mac or BSD platforms are not a myth, the platforms may be harder to infect but that doesn't mean some enterprising cracker won't find some chink in the armor. And as is often said in the Linux community: "The only reason not many of these come our way is because of Windows' greater visibility."

Probably of greater concern, though, are direct hacks and break-ins. Keep up with CERTand other security advisories, your patches, and have a clear defense plan and you should remain generally safe.

[innersense]

Mac math

What you wrote is what I had on my laptop...thanks for your post - at least i know im not going mad!

So what is it? Will it do may laptop any damage? Can I get rid of it?

Cheers

Innersense

[macmath]

I don't know enough to answer this question commandingly, but ...

a) It should not affect to the operation of the laptop.
b) I can't imagine it doing any harm to the hardware.
c) My guess is that it only will show up under very special circumstances (such as the first time you open the panel) and that you won't see it any more.

I have not been able to get it to happen myself.

Someone like mervTormel could probably figure out when it is invoked.

I would just ignore it.

[Bisam]

Hi all,

I'm new to this forum after having upgraded to 10.2.1...
I read this virus thread last night and couldn't help smiling at the mention of MS mail progs and IE also falling under this category. I have been using Entourage from OfficeX for a week or two now, having used Outlook Express in 9 without problems (sort of) for a long time.
Anyway, Entourage was open in back and I decided to check mail whilst reading this thread and low and behold, a new mail (spam? from which I don't suffer) came in, addressed to my main account, backdated (yesterday I think). I didn't see a paperclip, so no attachment and feeling safe as a Mac user, I opened the mail, which appreared to connect to a website to display html mail, (permanent DSL here) but only displayed a broken jpeg symbol. I closed the window and deleted the mail, selected it and a couple of others in the deleted pane and backspaced to get rid of them.

Since that moment, the sent mail pane is unable to display all its contents and will crash if I click where a sent mail should be. The program seems to work OK otherwise. I have quit it numerous times, logged out and re-booted, trashed the prefs in my user library and now re-installed (even to another drive) with no change. I don't particularly mind not using it and switching to Mail or shopping around for an alternative, but something is not quite right somewhere. Does this sound normal? Any ideas?

Mail seems usable, but it also leaves a copy of all mail on the server as I can pick them up with the laptop again! Seeing as I use email to recieve larger attachments, this could prove to be a bit of a nuisance. Is there a way to turn this off?

Thanks for your time...

Patrick

[mervTormel]

bisam,

close all MS apps, then launch entourage with the option key held down and try a 'typical' rebuild first.

[doxx]

working since 15 yrs with Macs and had viruses two or three times. No big deal at all. One was in the 90ies, kind of a worm virus and it spread over the whole network with about 15 machines... Disinfectant did the job very well...

[Jacques]

I found a good article (http://www.macobserver.com/editorial/2003/08/29.1.shtml) about this very subject today.

It's tally for Macintosh viruses:

Word Macro: 553
Classic Mac: 26
OS X: Zero

Jacques

[Irene]

About four years ago I got my daughter a Pismo as a college graduation gift. It came with a faulty track pad (actually the entire front acted as a huge trackpad, and you could not rest your wrist on the computer!) and was retuned to Apple for repair. It came back to us with that problem solved and with a virus. I'm fumbling for the name-- 7 dust, gold-dust, one of you may recall the name. Agax cured it.

Apple denied causing it but boards then showed a number of pople got the virus after having computers repaired at Apple.

[trinitrotoluene]

I work at a University computer lab, so MS Office is a must. A few months ago someone got a word macro virus on 15 of the computers.

[pink]

So far, all virii I saw (in ten years) were Word Macros (some of you probably remember Word 6...).
Most recent were 74 copies of such a thing on my bosses machine last week (no damage though, except for some mails being sent back....) ;)

part of my mail signature:

-- given the abundance of virii on the internet, we would greatly appreciate if you could refrain from sending Microsoft executables, including .doc files, as attachments, unless absolutely necessary. Thank you ! --

cheers, pink

[tlarkin]

I have been working with computers for about 8 to 9 years now, and have been employed in the computer field for almost 5 years. In my 5 years of experience repairing PC's, Macintosh, printers, laptops, etc. I have never once seen a mac virus. I have read about them. I think one time I was given a virus (on purpose) on a floppy disk from a co-worker (he kept a library of virii on removable media, I am not sure why). I never loaded it on a mac to see what it did but I think the virus was real old. So I am pretty sure the virus would not work on os 8.5.1 or higher.

So for me the macintosh virus is a myth, something you hear about but have never actually seen.

[sao]

Irene wrote:
I'm fumbling for the name-- 7 dust, gold-dust, one of you may recall the name. Agax cured it
That's the one that struck my 8500 several years ago, as I posted at the beginning of the thread. I got the little sucker when I realized I had an extension named 666 in my system folder.

The SevenDust virus is also called the 666 virus because it comes in two parts:

as an 'MDEF' resource inside (infected) applications, and as an Extension usually named 666.

The virus is also known as MDEF9806. There are many different variants of this virus in circulation.

The most common being the 'A' strain. Strains from A to D, are just trial versions, that simply spread rather than being destructive. Luckily, I got one of those, I think strain C or D. But the "E" strain has the job of deleting every non-application file at a pre determined trigger time.


http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/mac-sevendust.html

[anthlover]

It is my understatnding that mostly Macs can be Carriers and Recipients of Office virus without much I'll effect on the Mac.

I know there are some Marcro virus that can make Office unruly....

At the moment the main benefit of AntiViral seems not to spread Office Virus around.

----

[vickishome]

9 years on Macs
5 Mac computers
9 years connected online (BBSes/Internet)
9 years running MSWord

0 Viruses. :)

However, I have received a huge number of emails with Windows viruses attached. Just these last two weeks, I received over 100 emails with one virus and around 60 emails with another virus. My daughter, on a Windows computer, has a constant problem with viruses. She has one virus that's contained, but cannot be removed without wiping everything clean and starting over. My husband, also on a Windows computer, updates his antivirus files every day, scans for viruses every day, and has virus protection on his emails/downloads/new files. He still gets viruses every now and then.

My other daughter who's running my old G3 has -0- problems with viruses. And, of course, I have had -0- problems with viruses on my G4 -- or any of my Macs for that matter.

I'm sure Mac viruses exist, but I've never encountered one. And it's nothing like the nonrelenting onslaught of viruses that Windows users have to endure. Windows is so full of security holes that it's almost criminal that they allow the product to be sold to the public. I sometimes sit and wonder how Windows users put up with MS's security problems. I guess they've become so used to it that they've become numb each time a new viruses infects them. I do all I can to request that Windows users keep my email address out of their address books because I get so tired of receiving so many useless virus laden emails that their Windows computers spit out on a constant basis, but it's hard to convince them that having viruses is not (or should not be) a normal part of computing.

[Jacques]

It's interesting to note, virus as myth on the Macintosh has a one-twelve vote count - and right behind it is IE as a virus coming in at a one-ten count!

Jacques

[Mikey-San]

I HAVE to be the dork here:

http://www.bartleby.com/61/81/V0118100.html

The plural of "virus" is "viruses". "Virii" is neither a word nor a proper Latin root. (The root, "vir" has a nominative plural, "viri". More than that, who says this in conversation? Your doctor calls them viruses, right? Mine does. :-))

I'm really, really sorry about this post. One part of my brain is telling me to stop, but the one with the gun is telling that part to sit down and keep its mouth shut.

[tlarkin]

Originally posted by Mikey-San
I HAVE to be the dork here:

http://www.bartleby.com/61/81/V0118100.html

The plural of "virus" is "viruses". "Virii" is neither a word nor a proper Latin root. (The root, "vir" has a nominative plural, "viri". More than that, who says this in conversation? Your doctor calls them viruses, right? Mine does. :-))

I'm really, really sorry about this post. One part of my brain is telling me to stop, but the one with the gun is telling that part to sit down and keep its mouth shut.

Hahahaha Dork!

jes kiddin

I would like to say also I have found IE to be less buggy than safari. I still cannot pull up some of my companies internal sites on safari, however still works just fine with IE.

I do have a few macintosh viruses on disk somewhere an old co-worker of mine gave me. He said you never know when you might need these. He was kinda weird, you know the type of guy who probably kept 1000 rounds of ammunition in his house. However I have never looked at them, and I don't think they will infect anything above OS 8.5.1. I do have an old performa 6400 CD at home running OS 8.1 (its a 150 MHz with 48 MB of RAM - she's a haus) that I could toss the viruses on and see what they do. However, I am too lazy to pull the old computer out of the closet and then try to find and old school mac vga adapter to vga.

[yellow]

Originally posted by Mikey-San
The plural of "virus" is "viruses". "Virii" is neither a word nor a proper Latin root. Thank [insert non-existent-deity-here] someone said it. I cringe everytime I read/hear virii on some professional board/mail-list.

[Mikey-San]

You cringe, too? My brother. (-:

Thing is, tlarkin, IE 5/Mac's rendering engine isn't all that bad, but it's SLOW, like the rest of the app. I won't dig into IE's other problems. I'd rather go back to Reason than be here that long.

Heh.

I'm -1, Flamebait today!

[java_guy]

I had a virus waaay back when I was running on a Mac Classic. I believe it was a nVir variant as well. Anyway, Disinfectant took care of the little critter.

I'm sure if we start seeing a proliferation of virii, more anti-virus programs will follow. Until then, the best thing to do is to practice "safe" computing. :cool:

[tlarkin]

I personally like mozilla on my PC, I think its the best browser I have used in a long time. Great cookie manager, great pop up killer, its totally free and its for the most part pretty fast. Sometimes it will run chunky but not all the time. On my G4 here at work I will admit IE runs slow at times, but so does safari, and camino. I think safari will be a great web browser once apple gets all the bugs worked out of it. I still can only access my companies internal sites using IE on my macintosh computers. I have really no idea why this is, since I am not the network administrator I am just a lowly technician.

[vickishome]

I use Safari 99.9% of the time. On the occassions in which a webpage won't load with Safari, I open up IE. IE seems so old and clunky and S-L-O-W after I've used Safari for so long, but until Apple works out the kinks in Safari, I have no choice but to keep IE around.

I have managed to load some of the webpages that Safari normally has problems with by changing my cookie settings. I normally run with "only from sites you navigate to," but when Safari has problems, I find changing it to "always" works more times than not. This is especially true with banking/order type places. It seems they are using cookies from other sources, and you cannot proceed without them.

[nkuvu]

Originally posted by Mikey-San
The plural of "virus" is "viruses". "Virii" is neither a word nor a proper Latin root. (The root, "vir" has a nominative plural, "viri". More than that, who says this in conversation? Your doctor calls them viruses, right? Mine does. :-))
From the Jargon Lexicon (Chapter 1 (http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/introduction.html)):
Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay and are very conscious and inventive in their use of language. These traits seem to be common in young children, but the conformity-enforcing machine we are pleased to call an educational system bludgeons them out of most of us before adolescence. Thus, linguistic invention in most subcultures of the modern West is a halting and largely unconscious process. Hackers, by contrast, regard slang formation and use as a game to be played for conscious pleasure. Their inventions thus display an almost unique combination of the neotenous enjoyment of language-play with the discrimination of educated and powerful intelligence.
I tend to use the word virii, even though I know it's not really a word, and I know it's not the proper pluralization for virus. I also use words like wedgitude and lossage in day to day conversation. (Note that I tend to avoid these terms when in formal conversations)

While I realize that many people use the word virii thinking it is correct, there should also be a realization that some of us use it with humor in mind.

But of course you're totally right, and I just wanted to toss in my two copper plated zinc bits. :)

[tlarkin]

I like the word 'awesomest' its totally rad

[Mikey-San]

Sorry, but that hacker/jargon thing is justification to me. You might use it that way, but 99% of people who do actually think it's correct. I've seen a lot of professional publications use it.

What happened to editors? It seems like they're going out of style or something. (-:

[nkuvu]

It's all about context, I think.

If I'm posting to a forum, or writing an email to a list, I tend to be very informal. But in professional publications (online or in print) I only use real words. I'd never say virii if I was writing something professionally.

I'll also be happy to agree that a majority of the time, it's used in such a manner that it's obvious that the person using it thinks it to be correct. As long as you recognize that there is a small percentage of us who still use it (and know it to be wrong) for humor value, I'm satisfied.

It's a similar situation to fall-through in a switch statement. Most of the time it's unintended, but there are uses for it. Um, I can provide examples for any non-programmers who don't know what I'm talking about (and are interested).

[darndog]

Never been infected, I used to run the freeware Disinfectant and kept myself up to date (read Mac mag's instead of working), so did things like creating the graphics accelerator folder (so the virus wouldn't install), and turned off Quicktime autoplay (still do that now in OS X), This was all in a prepress dept so we got a lot of disks...


First Mac was the just released Quadra 950 with a 21" Monitor, after talking the boss out of buying the 700 because we *really* needed the extra horsepower, 20, yes, 20Mb Ram, ahh the old memories of Photoshopping an image spread across four 44Mb Syquest disks, ahh Syquest disks, How I hated those bastardo things...)


...and I've been using Mac's ever since.. I just love them...:)

dD

[Jacques]

IE as a virus has taken the lead in the polls!

ha

[tlarkin]

How is IE a virus? It does not attack the system. Just playing devil's advocate here :}

[Jacques]

Oh no!

I thought after that great troubleshooting wrap-up, you surely would be one of the very last to be infected by the IE that is virii (spelling intended).

:)

IE attacks settings, doesn't that count against it for something?

Now with Safari, Mozilla and More Internet - there's really no reason I can imagine to even have that bugger installed.

I haven't erased it, but I won't install it if Panther doesn't!

Jacques

[mervTormel]

Originally posted by Jacques
I haven't erased it, but I won't install it if Panther doesn't!

it does.

[macmath]

Deleting IE is the first thing I do after a fresh install of the OS (immediately after going through the groovy OS setup and registration procedure).

I'm not someone who goes around wearing a T-Shirt bashing Microsoft, but I refuse to reward or promote them by running anything of theirs on a computer of mine. Well, that's not quite true, as I don't trash "Times New Roman" or the other 'Microsoft Typography' fonts installed on my computer, but I do make a point not to use them.

I do not approve of their business practices, or their sloppy, often bloated software, which often seems to ignore security concerns. I recall Word documents grabbing snippets from your drive in the past and saving them within the (non-readable portions of) documents [probably an accident, but a gross error none-the-less], and of IE sending information back to MS.

Live Free or Die! ;-)

PS: It is fun, occasionally, to get carried away on some tangent and say things like this, or "Give me liberty or give me death!"

[meancode]

i have never seen anything in OS X that would resemble a virus *knocks on wood*

do you remember that autostart worm? that you could disable by turning off QuickTime Autorun. remember that a MacAddict CD had that virus on it.

That is the only virus I have ever had, hold only for the stupid MS Word macro viruses. Thanks to Windows no less.

[macmath]

Wow! Read this Walter S. Mossberg WSJ (http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20031023.html) article! It is sweet all the way around.

[jnasato]

I still use antivirus software, but I have only been saved by such software once, when some game was infected. In high school, a friend and I ran many well known viruses and trojan horses on a guy's Mac, and they really didn't do any damage... They were also easily removed with antivirus software. I've also tried running viruses on my ol' Motorola StarMax, and I remember that eventually there were some problems, but nothing as terrible as I had hoped.

[mysterydog]

I have worked on a mac at home or at work as an editor everyday for the last 15 years - and on a wintel computer for a total of 15 days in the same time- and i'll be ****ed if I have ever had any problem with a virus. I think some of the systems had virus protection, but I don't recall a specific problem related to a virus--it's usually hardware failure,bad cable, or 10 different people using the same system (yikes!).

I currently use Virex I got free from .Mac-makes me feel good to have it run sometimes, but I have no way of guaging its effectiveness: my 1Ghz TiBook has worked flawlessly since June.

The internet seems IMHO to be the source of 99% of the trouble now--what's a floppy?--so my stratagy is to have a seperate partition for net stuff for surf time, and then another seperate system for other apps. Yeah sometimes I do "cheat" and have the other parts. open if I'm doing a web site, but so far so good.

The greatest defence: Back up. Back up. Back up.

[santa]

I just ran virex and found dozens of infected files. all infected with various windows macro viruses and such. none were of any consequence to mac users but could spread if the files were transferred to a windows machine

[desert don]

I'm not sure if this is from a virus, but the "sound icon" that comes up on the screen for a few seconds after depressing on of the three sound keys above the number pad on the keyboard of my G-4 Cube running Tigar. It intrusively appears on my desktop intermittingly, I beleive when I move the IR mouse. Starts out slowly after starting the MAC and becomes more offensive with continued use, stopping all computer activity for 1-2 seconds until it fades away. It started when I had Jaguar installed from a disc a few years ago, then started up again after I clean installed Tigar. It completly disrupts being on the web and causes the phone line (the only acess I have) to disconnect, showing an ERROR CODE of 20. So disruptive that I'm sending this on my wifes PC, with much laughter in the background. I have no other software installed other than Tigar and Safari and no anti-virus. Thinking of trying Virex. Sure would appreciate any ideas, desert don

[yellow]

It's definitely not a virus. More likely a hardware problem with the keyboard. Try logging in as another user and seeing if the problem persists there as well.

[gonzo40]

Not sure if this is a virus, but could use some input from anyone who recognize's this...My G5 after running for a couple of minutes and sometimes on startup will have the image starting to shake and then all kind of vertical and horizontal colored lines kink of a plaid design will appear with eventual freezup and a box which says to restart computer....It seems to be getting worse...Anybody recognize this as a virsu? Thanks.

[yellow]

99% chance it's not a virus or any other type of malware.

This is an issue on it's own and you should start a new thread on it.

[vteck]

has anyone read about getting a virus with office installed?

[Anti]

has anyone read about getting a virus with office installed?

Yes; I've read that there are zero viruses for X without office, 24 with it caused macro vulnerabilities. This was a while ago, however.