Is Virus Possible With Turing?

[DemonWasp]

The biggest reason that there are fewer OSX viruses, in my opinion, than Windows viruses is that it's historically been much easier for a Windows exploit to spread autonomously and very quickly. Since Microsoft tries not to break backwards compatibility, viruses that affect one version of Windows tend to affect the next version too. Worse, Microsoft had to build a security model on top of their OS, rather than building an OS with a security model from the start.

If the obscurity argument worked, then you would see a lot more Linux viruses and Apache exploits because they power a huge fraction (> 50%) of the websites on the Internet. We do not: in fact, we see far more exploits with things like IIS and Tomcat than we do with Apache's httpd.

That said, the security story is a LOT better now. Modern CPUs have no-execute (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_bit) capability, and modern OSes have a pretty reasonable security model (obviously, some better than others). Most of the time now, autonomous execution isn't the OS's fault: it's the fault of some program running on the OS, usually a web browser (Safari I'm looking at you) or email client. This is why you run as User, not as root.

[ProgrammingFun]

DemonWasp @ Mon Jun 06, 2011 7:49 am wrote:

The biggest reason that there are fewer OSX viruses, in my opinion, than Windows viruses is that it's historically been much easier for a Windows exploit to spread autonomously and very quickly. Since Microsoft tries not to break backwards compatibility, viruses that affect one version of Windows tend to affect the next version too. Worse, Microsoft had to build a security model on top of their OS, rather than building an OS with a security model from the start.

I would think that the main reason would be the fact that there are exponentially less (54 million as of today) and hackers would be better off infecting the greater population...which uses Windows.

[DemonWasp]

I had started writing a rebuttal, when I remembered that I was just parroting things I'd read somewhere...on the Internet. See here: http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/skoll/anti-virus.php

[goroyoshi]

insectoid, I'm grade 9 and I can make some form of a virus, Sys.Exec and Dir.Delete

[Tony]

goroyoshi @ Mon Jun 06, 2011 6:57 pm wrote:

I can make some form of a virus...

You should re-read the entire thread. What you are thinking of is most definitely not a "virus", in a "payload delivery mechanism" sense.

What you are thinking of is "malware". You can certainly put together a program that lets a user delete their own files. There's never been any challenge to that.