[WinMac] Re: Possible security issue for MacOS?
Dan Schwartz(expresso[at]snip.net)
Wed, 10 Feb 1999 06:17:15 -0500
Answering inline...
At 01:25 AM 2/10/99 -0600, you wrote:
>A thought occurred to me as I was thinking through the solutions to
>Dan's Floppyless iMac disk utilities . . . that being the security
>issues involved when so many new utilities on the Mac no longer require
>the extensions to be on in order to operate and can run without any
>pieces being active in the system folder.
Actually, this has always been the case... It's just becoming more
prevalent with the advent of "fat binary" code 5 years ago. For example,
PageMaker 4 introduced the ALDRESC (or something like that) which was along
these lines...
>
>We all know how susceptible the Wintel OS is to attack from viruses and
marauders.
You are quite correct about this fact! However, NT/x86 and especially
AlphaNT are much more immune. The fact alone that NT doesn't allow direct
hardware access helps isolate virii from underlying x86 hardware. You'll
still crash; but the probability of damage with NT is lower. And now that
there are over 20,000 x86 virii, you have to start talking probabilities.
[For more info, check out <http://www.sophos.com>, where they rank reports
of virii by percentage... Mostly "Laroux" macro virii, which are VERY
cross-platform.]
>
>Perhaps the Mac has been partially spared due to the fact that it was
>difficult to do anything with it on-the-fly so to speak. Most of the
>time you would have to reboot after an installation, extensions had to
>be on . . . it just seems that the System was difficult to take-over
>from the outside looking in.
Not really... The Mac community over the years has been spared mostly due
to the "Honor System." But with direct hardware access a virus can be just
as devastating as in windoze.
Hope this helps!
Dan
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