Mac OS X virus question

[Remyo]

Heard this in a technical portion of a morning radio show. The radio ppl are adamant mac supporters and said while there are trojans on Mac OS X there has yet to be a self propagating virus made to attack that OS. Is this true?

[darkhero168]

there probably are.. but it's just not that popular becuase the majority of the people out there use PC's. what's the point of making a self infecting virus if you're not hitting the majority of the world?

[Isiolia]

You can check around for virus scanners to see. Usually they name things like w32.virusname or osx.virusname, so a simple search on osx in a virus database would show. There are some worms in addition to trojans, but generally speaking there are very, very few of them with very low distribution.

That's not to say that they can't be made. But the market share of Macs has been their friend as far as this goes. The classic Mac OS had a few hundred known viruses, of which fewer than 30 weren't Word macro viruses.

Malware is similarly MIA for the Mac. There have been a handful of cases, but it's far from the tens of thousands of examples present on Windows.

I've done tech support at varying levels for years now, Macs and PCs. I've cleaned off a LOT of PCs with viruses and spyware. Had to go around making sure every PC was up to date lest it got infected.

I've never seen a Mac with a virus. Ever. ::knocks on wood::