MAC or PC

[famousringo]

marc said:

The biggest infection we had in the last few months was a lame malware that spread to 5 machines. Of course that was probably the tip of the iceberg, I assume there was probably something much more serious underneath the malware but, of course, thanks to the wisdom of our military advisors, none of our MAC's have any anti-virus software because aparently "MAC's dont get virii" and they didnt want to spend another $1000 or so (after spending hundreds of thousands on AVID garbage) for the protection. This was the 2nd time we had an infection of this type on the macs, we had another earlier this year but only 1 machine was hit or at least that is all we found at the time. Ok so malware is not a virus but obviously it had to be delivered by some virus to begin with so it counts. Those systems had to be purged and reinstalled clean.

I also had the iwork virus infect 1 system earlier this year. And last year we had a few hits on the macs as well. I would have to look at old logs to see what they were.

Anyway, point is, macs are gaining a lot of popularity so it follows that virus writters are now stepping up their mac attacks.

I'll assume that you actually meant to respond to me, here.

I suspected that it was due to users downloading pirated software and giving it their admin password. I hope you righteously spanked your users for doing something that stupid on a work machine. If I were you, I'd solve the problem by taking away their admin access to their workstation. I have yet to hear of a serious Mac virus that doesn't require an admin password.

You're right, Mac OS X isn't completely idiot-proof. There's a certain level of stupid that no device can be designed to withstand. Reminds of a case I heard of where a lady wanted her MacBook repaired because she took a belt-sander to it to remove the paint. It wasn't painted, of course. That was the plastic case that she tore through.