Toolkit

Story: OSX 'at risk from attack'

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This is just such a load of self-serving crap ...

Just last night my fiancée told me people were telling her they couldn't access her MSN Group site because "Spyware Doctor 3.1 wouldn't let them" ... I downloaded it to my work PC and installed it (it wouldn't run in Virtual PC 7 on my home Mac).

However the part that handles "live" blocking of sites is in their persistent "OnGuard" section which you have to pay for ... not wanting to pay just to test it once I found a [k] on an Astalavista-type [k] site ... downloaded it and ran the "start" script and immediately things went haywire (not to mention it didn't [k] Spyware Doctor). In a self-referential act I ran Spyware Doctor which now said there were over 1000 infections ... the [k] had installed toolbars, HTML hijackers, you name it. Found another [k] and removed all of those ... or so I thought.

To make a long story short, I ran 3 or 4 programs including a Registry fixer and spent a couple of hours removing all of this crap (including 5 reboots) before everything was finally eradicated ... and NONE of this would ever happen on a Mac ... the "Registry" concept is so damn retarded ... TSR's that sit there and can't be killed with Task Manager ... blah blah blah and so on and so on ... the reason there's all these viruses and trojans and malware/spyware for the PC is because WINDOZE BLOWS, not because of market share - Mac OS X is, fundamentally, a UNIX under the hood so it's subject to the same issues as Linux and other Unices/derivatives - yes there are vulnerabilities but I see them every day at work and the Linux ones are so obscure and unexploitable compared to the Windoze ones it's not even comparable.

The bottom line: Symantec is screaming "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" - would you trust the company saying that when they're the ones selling the fallout shelters?

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