{"id":186,"date":"2003-09-09T01:20:28","date_gmt":"2003-09-09T06:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/2003\/09\/09\/what-about-mac-viruses\/"},"modified":"2006-12-15T22:38:52","modified_gmt":"2006-12-16T03:38:52","slug":"what-about-mac-viruses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/2003\/09\/09\/what-about-mac-viruses\/","title":{"rendered":"What about Mac Viruses?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a107'><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.macslash.org\/\">MacSlash<\/a> had a link to an article at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.macobserver.com\">Mac Observer<\/a> which covered one person&#8217;s hunt to find information on Mac Viruses.  After searching Network Associates and Virex&#8217;s Database using a simple search for the word &#8216;Macintosh&#8217;  and subtracted out all of the viruses that were Word or Excel based Macros (ah the joys of scripting gone bad) he came up with a fat total of&#8230;&#8230;.  <b>26<\/b>.  Yep 26.  Then he looked for OS X specific ones from that list and found a grand total of <b>0<\/b>.  That&#8217;s quite amusing.<\/p>\n<p>However, being powered by many tools from UNIX land, Mac OS X must watch the security watches for many of the same exploits that are found in UNIX land but from what I&#8217;ve seen Apple has been very good at moving forward with those updates.<\/p>\n<p>While that&#8217;s assuring, personally I expect to see more Mac specific viruses in the future if the platform starts picking up.  Also, if we add back in the Office based viruses the number jumps up&#8230; dramatically.  If we add back the Word and Excel based viruses we get around 579 which is quite a few.   Just because they come from Word and Excel you can&#8217;t wave a hand and say &#8216;Gee that&#8217;s Microsoft&#8217;s problem&#8217; since it affects the Mac as well which is bad.  But at least 579 is a lot smaller than 71,000.<\/p>\n<p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>MacSlash had a link to an article at the Mac Observer which covered one person&#8217;s hunt to find information on Mac Viruses. After searching Network Associates and Virex&#8217;s Database using a simple search for the word &#8216;Macintosh&#8217; and subtracted out all of the viruses that were Word or Excel based Macros (ah the joys of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":703,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1213,1214],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mac","category-osx"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/703"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}