Andrew Ludgate, of Sophos Canada, just put up a post that might interest Mac users: while the main thrust of the blog is generic “how to be safe on the internet” advice (and yes, it is pretty much platform-neutral), it does cast an interesting sidelight on what sort of drive-by malware that can wash up on a Mac. As he points out, most of these won’t directly affect Mac users directly.
What’s more, most of them won’t be inadvertently transferred to PCs as happened with so many macro viruses in the 1990s, since most malware isn’t transferred by/as documents. There are, of course, some possible exceptions, notably some targeted malware using 0-days affecting apps like Acrobat and Office, and platform-independent malware which could be configured to execute some OS X-specific payload, and some lists of OS X malware include borderline scripting malware that doesn’t execute successfully on OS X, but could be tweaked to do so. (None of them are listed on this site, but then our descriptions page is far from complete.)
The post is: You practice safe computing, so why do you still see malware?
David Harley CITP FBCS CISSP
Small Blue-Green World/AVIEN/Mac Virus
