Re: Cost of viruses etc., on PC's

Hi John,

Your certainly overstating the case of recent security holes and OS X.
I can think of two recent holes:

1. Where certain cooked-up gifs can cause Safari (but not other
browsers) to crash, AND

2. A case where someone programmed a virus, but it was something that
your machine could only get infected by through a browser. You had to
deliberately infect your machine.

Both of these holes have been patched.

John Slade wrote:

What insecure OS? OS X? In fact in recent months, there have been more
security holes that would allow viruses run on Macs than PCs. Now you have
to wonder why nobody save a few have targeted Macs.


While Apple does not have Microsoft's marketshare Apple, because of
iTunes, iPods, and the Apple music store is a high profile company. If
you think no one is targeting Macintosh computers because of
marketshare, I'd counter that you're mistaken. I fathom that infecting
OS X and causing tens of millions of dollars of damage would be a
hacker's dream.

It was your fault if you had to take your PC in to get it fixed
because of a virus. In the most extreme cases of viruses, it would not have
to be taken to CompUSA to get fixed. You either find a way to get rid of the
virus which is very easy to do or you reinstall. It would seem someone like
you would not know much about the upkeep of a computer.


I only wish that you were right about easily getting rid of viruses. On
the IBM All-In-On the hackers got access to my machine and edited the
firmware of the box so that the built-in-speakers would play
white-noise at FULL VOLUME. You couldn't turn it off.

On my ThinkPad the viruses made it so that I could no longer add and
remove programs. I could not edit the registry. The software for doing
that had been either removed or effectively disabled.

On my Transnote the machine, I don't know exactly what happened, but
they made it so that the machine only runs at about 10 Mhz.

As to my not knowing about how to upkeep a Windows machine, I plead
guilty as charged.


Can you explain the word "lost" to me? What exactly happened to your PC?

You mean aside from the virus symptoms?

My ThinkPad is sitting in a back pack under my desk waiting to be
recycled. I think it can be turned into a real machine again. I gave
away the All-In-One to a virus expert. I told him he could keep the
machine if he could fix it. He experimented with using a USB set up for
sound. But he ended up recycling the machine. The Transnote is sitting
unused in my daughter-in-law's house.


I've never seen a PC lost to a virus.

It happened to me.

The virus expert who examined my machine said he'd never seen a machine
as infected as mine. It had 48 viruses on it.


The absolute worst case I've seen was
someone having to reinstall the OS and then they were able to keep their
setting and most of the software.

The worst is if they get to the system firmware.

Typically when it disables a system to
where it won't boot, only the system files are lost and not personal data. I
suspect that it would take a particular person to actually lose a machine to
software. You would have to be a special kind of stupid to actually lose
three machines to a virus. But then again, we're talking about a Mac Kook
here so I'm not shocked.


I plead guilty.

BTW Can you tell me what viruses actually destroyed the three PCs and how
long ago did this happen?


2005. At that time if I put a Windows machine on my network it would
have been infected in less than 10 minutes. I learned that by
reinstalling the OS on the Transnote and connecting to the internet -
hoping to download a patch.

.

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