i have found i get most viruses from newsgroups and links posted in newsgroups. the most common virus i have found in the last couple of months has been the JS Exception Exploit virus (JavaScript Exception Exploit). easy to detect with an up to data virus software and once Quarantined can be deleted quite safely.
i suspect worms and macro thingies that auto transmit themselves to everybody on your address book as one person can spread it too hundreds (not me i remember emails in my head and have no names in my address books)
second is probably trojans with the WWW and fast bandwidth
warez are getting bad real bad , but then i don’t have fast bandwidth so don’t get this either
Virus vendors have been incredibly slow to quantify virus metrics; it’s only been in the past few months that it’s been common to keep track of such data.
Message Labs has the longest running list. Their all time list shows that Sircam is by far the most common, but they’re only detecting viruses that travel by e-mail. However, it’s unlikely that earlier viruses reached those numbers – and Sircam’s only been around since last August.
Mac virus vectors of contagion:
I got a virus twice–once in or around 1987, when our school’s computer lab was a perpetual breeding ground for them, I got the nVIR virus, and again in the vicinity of 2000, when I had been going through a box of old diskettes for the boss before throwing them away, I gave myself MDEF (which by then was nearly 10 years old). In both cases, the vector was the plain old floppy disk.
Several of our clients were infected with copies of the Autostart worm that were on Zip or Jaz cartridge, or had been burned onto CDs.
Many Mac users got infected from downloads back in the BBS days where you were asked to contribute something if you downloaded something. A few viruses were actually distributed via diskette or CD from Magazines or user groups. The larger shareware repositories such as ZiffNet (remember them?) and Info-Mac were better about checking for viruses before putting files where they could be downloaded.
Word macro viruses got into the Mac community from PC users and spread among Mac users, using us as passive carriers.
Hypercard viruses used to be a problem, and spread when Hypercard stacks were exchanged among Hypercard programmers.
Mac users have not been susceptible to the recent virus trend, the email virus, although mainly just because no one has hit us up with one. (God knows there are enough Mac users who use Outlook in one form or another to constitute a critical mass!).
Mac users tend to be complacent about viruses. For a long time, we had free anti-virus software courtesy of John Norstadt, the Disinfectant program. He stopped updating Disinfectant and recommended against relying on it back in 1997, but until the AutoStart worm in late 1999, there had been no new Mac viruses in the “wild” since 1994. We rely a lot on the tendency of virus writers to write viruses that can only execute under DOS or Windows, and many of us don’t have any anti-virus software at all. (Just our good fortune that they haven’t tended to write clever and malicious cross-platform Java viruses, I guess).
JS.Exception.Exploit isn’t really the name of a specific virus. It’s a detection for usage of a specific security hole in Internet Explorer. Usually web sites use this security hole to change your Start Page without permission.
AHunter3:
I not sure why you’d say that Word for Mac users are passive carriers when a fair number of WordMacro viruses do actively spread on Mac for Word.
And Mac users did have a mass-mailing script worm several months ago: Mac/Simpsons@MM. It was actually pretty successful considering the size of the vulnerable population.
Yeah, but as far as I know, they don’t deliver any payload except when on a PC–on a Mac they just spread, turning Macs into Typhoid Marys.
Oops, I missed that one completely. Thanks for the heads-up.
Well, I don’t know of any Word macro virus payloads that would affect the Mac as a whole, but payloads like swapping around words in the current document would still work.