(April 30, 2013 at 5:10 pm)Tiberius Wrote:Quote:Traditionally, it suffers little from viruses... however, the surge in mac ownership of the past few years has made it worthwhile investing in viruses for mac... so those are on the rise, while the users are convinced they are invulnerable just because they're not running windows... disaster waiting to happen?Well, this depends. You can't just compare viruses on Windows to viruses on OS X/Linux. The main reason being that the Windows environment is incredibly insecure, often by design. For instance, most people install and use Windows as the Administrator account, so viruses often have no problem elevating privilege and doing nasty stuff. On OS X and Linux, the administrator account is separate, and requires a password if you want to use it. Unless the virus knows the password, it has to use other ways to elevate privilege (which are much harder).
So yes, no operating system is invulnerable; but OS X and Linux are more secure than Windows in many respects.
Ever since Vista, that windows tries to make users create and use a standard user account, instead of the administrator one.... regrettably, many people got too used to the administrator account and just use it and don't even think about it.
However, if security is a concern, the user will move to a user account.
UNIX based OSes enforce the user to create a user account and strongly discourage the usage of the root account.... I remember a Ubuntu that wouldn't even allow you to use the root account under the window manager... or maybe I remember wrong... :-s
