Mac OS X
hawks1528 (45 points) | Sun, 2009-07-26 17:17I have an assignment to write 3 or 4 paragraphs about:
"Whether or not a Mac OS X is in-fact immune to viruses, malicious software, and other risks of running a pc on the internet? Is it true? Would I recommend clients using an Apple product because they are immune to all threats?"
My issue is I have never followed the debate. I have never owned an Apple product nor know anyone that has.
So I am reaching out to you to for guidance. If anyone can steer me in the direction of some good references, or just enlighten me on the subject, it would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
No OS is immune to threats. But in practice OS X has a very good track record compared to other OS.
There are no viruses for OS X in the wild, which means that while concepts of viruses may exist they never went viral affecting Macs.
I have been the admin for two design studios with dozens of Macs in the last 10 years and we never ever had to install any virus protection and we never had any issues with viruses.
The main advantage of OS X is that it asks the user for confirmation before anything is installed on the system. So a virus can't install itself as on other OS.
The only theoretical way to install a virus on OS X is to trick a user into installing an application that they think it's something else. In other words you can write a real trojan that poses as a Word processor and in-fact it's an application that deletes your Hard Drive. But if you only install apps from known and trusted sources this will unlikely to happen to you.
Why is OS X safer? There are many reasons, some of them are:
• Relies on Unix, which has been refined for security for more than 20 years
• It's better designed and supported than other OS
• It's less popular than Windows, so there is a smaller benefit for crackers to find an exploit (Most exploits are designed to make your computer a zombie to be used for DDOS attacks. There are only 5% or less Macs out there, so OS X isn't the right platform to use for DDOS networks.)
Yes, you should recommend your clients using OS X. It's the safest, most feature full and supported OS out there.
In comparison, while the different flavors of Windows are significantly more popular there are literally hundreds of thousands of viruses exist for Windows. Most of them are harmless if you have proper updates and virus protection, but the threat is significant especially for a newbie. Chances are if you're a Windows user at one point in time you will be affected by some malicious code.