Living in the Mac world, one does not understand the concept of Viruses. However Symantec, makers of Norton Anti Virus, are desperate to increase category by trying to float rumpours about Mac Viruses, and sell their wares to us Mac users. I couldnt agree more with twoDotOne.com's post. To all Mac users : No need to panic. As of now, you are safe. Let Symantec market its wares to PC users. This has also made me wonder if virus busting companies are the ones that MAKE the virus in the first place.
Symantec trying to sell Mac users antivirus
November 4th, 2006
A new clueless attempt to shed panic amongst the Mac user community comes from a major anti-virus company.
This “demo virus” to demonstrate that the danger is “real” is an attempt to invite Mac users to waste their money on an anti-virus for the apple of their eyes.
I want to throw my two cents on this, and tell the sporadic rt() reader that I own
2 G5
1 12? pbook
1 MacBook
1 Mac mini
all of them are connected to the internet almost 24/7 (except the laptops).
I’m a very active downloader and I like testing new software etc.
I never had virus issues on mac, and I can’t state the same for my only windows machine.
I invite everybody to read
Rui Carmo’slittle piece on the matter and check out his mac virus picture nonetheless.
I also include Rui Carmo's post:
blog/2006-11-03
Drumming Up Some Business
I've never liked anti-virus companies - not just because they sell stuff that doesn't address the root cause of the Windows problem, but mostly because sometimes they seem to go out of their way to ensure people are aware that viruses can exist for any platform, just in the off-chance they can charge you for "protecting" it.
Remember, folks, these are the people who warned you about Pocket PC viruses (which, by the way, are almost as thin on the ground as Mac ones). And about Symbian viruses (or the likelyhood thereof, since all that ever popped up were a couple of stunted trojans you had to be pretty clueless to run anyway). These are the people who search so avidly for new markets that they who tried to sell you 2MB of executable code to protect your Palm from Windows viruses.
In short, the people who have waking, hallucinogenic dreams regarding all forms of unfeasible contagion by propagation of executable core across just about every computing platform known to man (except for the toaster), without the aid of recreational chemicals (although they obviously need the smell of fresh dollar bills to keep high).
So it doesn't surprise me in the least that one of the flagship companies in that market completely botched up the "announcement" of a Mac virus - or something that is nothing more than yet another proof of concept without any real risk whatsoever.
It isn't even the first stab at this kind of vacuous claim - all others quickly faded into oblivion, and make for challenging Google hunts, especially if you add "confirmed" to the search string.
Not everything is lost, though. I can still claim to have photographed the first real, live Mac OS X virus in action, two years ago.
