Do Mac viruses exist?

[potski205]

I have been told that there is no such thing as an Apple Mac virus. Is this true?

[Ethel]

There are a lot fewer viruses, but they are there and they are becoming more common.

The more Macs that are sold, the more worthwhile it will be for these people to create viruses for them.

[WoWo]

"A program called "Elk Cloner" is credited with being the first computer virus to appear "in the wild" -- that is, outside the single computer or lab where it was created. Written in 1982 by Rich Skrenta, it attached itself to the Apple DOS 3.3 operating system and spread by floppy disk."

The truth is if you are going to the hassle or creating a virus you might as well do it on a platform with the most exposure, in other words Windows, however that is not to say they do not exist on Mac's but they are few and far between when compared with Windows.

[fo3nix]

Two things here:

Mac OS 9 and below

Mac OS X

OS 9 and below did have viruses, but not that many. Partially it was that its security features were actually pretty good, and that there were relatively few users compared to windows software.

OS X has had some viruses created for it, but none have actually managed to move across networks and actually spread to do damange, mainly down to the fact that OS X is unix with bells ans whistles, and thus has a good security model.

So basically, for current macs, they have been written, but none have ever actually properly worked.