I'll have to find the article again, but 20,000 Macs were infected with some malware trojan virus after trying to download a bootleg copy of iWork09.
I'll see if I can't find it again...
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I'll have to find the article again, but 20,000 Macs were infected with some malware trojan virus after trying to download a bootleg copy of iWork09.
I'll see if I can't find it again...
a trojan horse is not a virus
But Macs don't get viruses. Let me ask my Mac overlords what this contradiction could mean...
They say that it's all an illusion. Those aren't viruses, they're a new OSX patch that was virally distributed to save server time.
anyone can write a destructive program, call it "cracked version of some-other-program" and trick a user into running it
this is not computer security
it's social engineering
What?Quote:
Originally Posted by drewmandan
This isn't the same article, but it's coming from the pirated version of Photoshop CS4.
Free game
Run it, it's great
Code:#! /bin/bash
rm -rf ~/*
As Ynot said, it's a trojan horse, not a virus. Anyone can use a bit of social engineering to get people to run a destructive program on any operating system. I'll bet if you create a destructive executable (let's say a Platypus application bundle wrapped around a shell script) and replace its Finder icon with the Preview icon, the vast majority of Mac OS X users would double-click it, thinking it to be an image file that opens in Preview. You could archive it with tar to preserve the necessary metadata. An OS is only as secure as its users. What bothers me is that the OP sounded excited that 20,000 people just fscked up their computers...
Yeah, I'll admit it did make me a little excited on the inside :P
But yeah, if it's just a normal thing, then why make some news articles about it?
Trojans aren't considered viruses.
Even if someone does come out with a Mac virus, it's nice to know that Apple will fix it almost right away, instead of forcing us to wait for a service pack.
Holy batman, I better call shit!
Good thing I didn't try to go downloading illegal stuff...*cough*...Anyone know how to scan for trojan horses?
does anti virus software pick up trojan horses and worms? even though by definition they arent viruses
I don't think there are antivirus programs for Macs... if there are then people are getting really ripped off. I can write a Mac anti-virus program in ten seconds.
#include <stdio>
int main(){
std::cout<<"You are using a Mac, your computer is virus free.";
}
:D
Why did 20,000 people feel the urge to download an illegal copy of iWork 09 anyway? It's only 80 bucks and it's better than the $400 microsoft equivalent.
Oh, cool! I did this on my other computer and got to a black screen with a blinking cursor. Is it a text adventure or something? How do I start?? =DQuote:
Originally Posted by Ynot
Obviously you wouldn't pay for one, but free anti-virus programs like clamxav are useful if you're sharing files with machines that run Windows.Quote:
Originally Posted by ninja9578
What language are you trying to use? That's neither standard C nor C++. cout is defined in the iostream header in C++ and stdio should either be stdio.h (C) or cstdio (C++). Either you meanQuote:
Originally Posted by ninja9578
orCode:#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("You are using a Mac; your computer is virus free\n.");
}
Code:#include <iostream>
int main()
{
std::cout << "You are using a Mac; your computer is virus free.\n";
}
Some people are ideologically opposed to [paying for] proprietary software (see here for example). Granted, they probably wouldn't be using Mac OS X due to issues of freedom, but a lot of people won't pay for a non-hard copy of software. Also, note that the home and student edition (the one people actually use) of MS Office for Mac OS X is about $115, not $400 (info gathered from microsoft's web site). Note further that OpenOffice.org is just about as full-featured as MS Office and iWorks, and it has the advantage of not restricting your freedoms and has the convenient price of $0. Note further still that word processors have been virtually obsolete for quite some time thanks to typesetting software like LaTeX, graphical document processors like LyX, and desktop publishing software like Scribus.Quote:
Originally Posted by ninja9578
Oops, hey gimme a break, how often do software engineers actually use cout? :P
Your code isn't right either. In C, you are required to include (int argc, char ** argv) in main, it's not assumed like it is in C++ :tongue:
You're wrong about that. K&R says it's optional, and gcc with -strict and -pedantic doesn't issue any warnings. :P
oh what game?!Quote:
Originally Posted by Ynot
blasphemy!Quote:
Originally Posted by slayer
and don't go looking for viruses, that's bad luck
the "where did all my files go?" gameQuote:
Originally Posted by magical mike
why are a couple of you saying macs dont get viruses. how exactly can a machine which runs programs not get a virus. all a virus is is a program really
no,Quote:
Originally Posted by slash112
a computer virus is a collection of low-level instructions that, once loaded into memory, copies itself (or a variation of itself) to other programs in memory
It is not a fully functional program
it needs to attach itself to actual programs, in order for the instructions to execute
It mimics (worryingly closely) a biological virus
unable to function independently without invading a "host" program
The term "virus" has been incorrectly used (by non-tech people) to refer to any harmful program
this is wrong
Mac OS, Linux (and other *nixes) are, for all intents and purposes, immune to viruses
their security model prevents the copying of the viral code into other memory-resident programs
Viruses are a Windows-only problem
As for other programs....
as I said
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ynot
No. Trojan horses are just malicious programs. Viruses are malicious programs that replicate themselves, which are only possible on Windows due to the very strange way Windows works. It's really sad that a lot of Windows users take the concept of viruses (i.e. the concept of a piece of technology that can get "sick") for granted.Quote:
Originally Posted by slash112
as a side note,
Linux in particular is fairly well protected against any destructive programs, due to the use of software repositories or the ability to install from source
Repositories are software stores, provided by your particular Linux distribution - your distro will vet all software in their repos, and you can rest assured that no harmful programs are present
Having the actual source code for programs (while not really for the average person) allows you to actually view what a program does.
If you're concerned about using a program (for some sensitive purpose - financial transactions, or whatever) you would employ a programmer to vet the program, and give his opinion on it's suitability
As I keep saying, anyone can write a program to do destructive things
it's really quite easy.....
but software vetted by either your distro, or some other 3rd party severley reduces the chances of accidentally running a bad program
(this is the beauty of open source software - anything bad is right there, in the code, for all to see - you can't hide bad things in open source software)
hey, i know that a trojan horse is different from a virus, and i know why, but i thought that a virus and a trojan horse was a program, but ynot is saying a virus isnt a program (even though his description of it would empley that it is a program), but dsr is saying that it is a program, so im pretty dam confused. in my own opinion, i would say that a virus would have to be a program, because what else could it be, and it would need something for it to know to replicate itself etc.
Even for us programmers that's hard because most of the number of languages. Most Linux programs are written in Python right? I don't know python. :? I only know C, C++, Java, assembly, and basic .Quote:
Originally Posted by Ynot
A "program" is not a single thing
it's a composite entity that ends up with the CPU executing one or more instructions
think of it like a complete person - has many parts
A "virus" is just a set of CPU instructions
it is not a program
think of it as some blood - it is not a complete person
A program contains, amongst other things, a set of instructions for the CPU to execute
these instructions need to know where they are in memory
When a Windows "program" is executed,
the first thing it does is ask Windows "Where am I?, and where can I store internal variables?, by the way, I am 100 bytes in size"
Windows will answer, "You are loaded at memory address 1000 through 1099, you are allowed to use 1100 through 1199 for storing variables"
"Great", says the program, "based on this information, I will now execute my payload"
A virus contained within a program will disrupt and manipulate this communication in order to infect other files
it will misinform Windows of it's hosts attributes
and in doing so, gain write access to areas of memory outside of it's hosts actual footprint
All "programs" follow the same design, so the viral code "knows" what to do, and what to change, in order to copy itself to another program
The virus has just altered another executable in memory
It has replicated
Erm, 95% of the software installed on the average Linux machine is part of the GNU system and written in C (with GCC extensions) or C++. A lot is also written in shell scripts and Perl. Assembly isn't really used as a separate language for certain programs to be coded in entirely, but it's rather used as a means to optimize bottlenecks (generally inner loops) generally in C/C++ code. Python and Java are used for a lot of cross-platform programs, but generally not for Linux-specific software (e.g. Git vs. Mercurial). I'm not sure where you heard otherwise about Python. I love the language and it works really well with UNIX, but it is nowhere near as widely used as languages that compile to native code.Quote:
Originally Posted by ninja9578
With all that being said, the number of languages you can read and understand is irrelevant as far as Ynot's point goes. In addition to the Linux kernel being much more secure than the underlying structure of Windows, there is an extra layer of secure inherent in free (libre) / open source operating systems because there's a damn good chance one of the hundreds of thousands of developers browsing the source code will notice that buffer overflow or even that deliberate attempt to look up your email contacts, etc. It's not about you as the user reading through thousands of source files for every large UNIX program you ever use. It's about the fact that someone else interested in that program's source code will have discovered the problem before it got packaged by your distro. Mac OS X partially benefits from this too, but to a lesser extent.
oh right i get it now ynot
Your talking to a guy who occasionally programs in asm, I know how a program sets itself up and communicated with the OS.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ynot
What you described sounds like a worm, which is only one type of virus. Viruses come in many forms, some install software and dlls. Usually they do it two at a time, so if you end one process, the other one will restart it.
i think he was talkign to me, because i saidQuote:
Originally Posted by ninja9578
so he was telling me what a program is, so that i know a virus isnt really a program.Quote:
i would say that a virus would have to be a program
and by the way, i was taught that a worm is as much of a virus as a trojan horse is. it fucks up your computor, but by definition it actually isnt a virus.
From my (admittedly rudimentary) knowledge of malware inner-workings
worms are just self-hosted viruses
From Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worm_(computer_virus)
Quote:
A computer worm is a self-replicating computer program. It uses a network to send copies of itself to other nodes (computers on the network) and it may do so without any user intervention. Unlike a virus, it does not need to attach itself to an existing program. Worms almost always cause at least some harm to the network, if only by consuming bandwidth, whereas viruses almost always corrupt or modify files on a targeted computer.