News Mac OS X Machines Roped Into Jnanabot Network

Mac machines make up 16 per cent of a botnet's systems, despite their reputation for security.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2011/01/21/mac-os-x-jnanabot-infection/1

 

if its 16% does that mean all macs have this bot running on it

 

i'm not suprised at all, as a lot of mac users still believe they are immune from malware, and don't run any form of antivirus.

i do educate my customers in such matters though wether they listen is upto them though.

 

It means that 16% percent of all INFECTED systems are running os x.

That does not translate to all os x systems or 16% of all os x systems.

 

It's just the users who still believe it to be completely secure.

Doesn't matter which OS you use, you should have the very minimum of free software like AVG or Security Essentials, whatever you choose it's better than nothing.

 

what % of the worlds computers are running OSX? because if it is less than 16% then surely a greater persentage of OSX machines have this virus than windows machines.

 

It's not impossible that a higher percentage of Mac users than Windows users will be infected as they think they are immune to infection. that doesn't mean that there arn't an awful lot of dumb Windows users with rubbish or out of date internet security software though!

 

Graph just shows how much of a security liability XP was with 3/4 of all infections.

 

It is the percentage of total systems infected with the bot! It doesnt mean that 16% of osx systems are infected.
Nor 38% of all xp systems.

Geez read the article....

 

Apple, It just works......... for everyone else

 

If 16% of infections are Apple machines yet only 5% of the worlds machines are Apple then the % of infection for OSx is higher than for Windows.

Is what Drifcar was saying. So. Er. Geez read the post....?

 

they didnt test every single apple machine in the world for this worm. 16 percent of what they TESTED in december had the worm . its not rocket science.

 

Oh come on guys. Let's look at the facts:

Jnanabot is a Trojan, not a "worm" or "virus". This means it requires a user to install it and cannot self replicate. IE it cannot infect other machines, the most any trojan can do is try and trick other users into installing copies of it (IE "Click here to install this cool app" type spam.)

So it only gets installed when someone is dumb enough to install it... and doesn't have AV installed to say "Don't do that you dumb b*tch"

So the numbers don't give any indication to the most secure platform, but to the best protected users. Many OSX users don't have any anti-virus software (a mistake in my opinion), where a higher percentage of PC users do due to the greater risks of those machines.

You could say this proves that mac owners are statistically more dumb... but again not necessarily the case. More that if you've got someone who's really not got a clue when it comes to computers and computer security. Give them a mac - they'll be better off and much less likely to end up with a computer full of smiley central popups and adverts for dubious stuff.

I've not had a virus in over a decade on either my PC or my MAC. Why? Because I don't open sh*tty apps.

 

woohoo i'm glad i'm a linux user. however, it makes me question if free-bsd could get infected.

fyi, altho linux is unix-like and osx is based on bsd (a variant of unix), mac is so heavily modified that it isn't really similar to bsd at all. you can compare this to michael jackson - he was originally a black man but had so much plastic surgery that he became white and almost feminine looking.

 

michael jackson did not have plastic surgery to become white he had vitiligo universalis get a facts right.

 

I think you failed at reading his post actually.

What he said was reasonable, if these figures do not correspond to the usage share of operating systems then that means certain operating systems are more likely to have the trojan.

Figures from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems
Note though its web-clients so not directly computers (but you need the internet to get this trojan so the point is probably moot). Also there are other web OSs now (e.g. iOS and blackberry).

Windows total: 88%
OSX Total: 7%

The OSX total of infections is 16% and Windows share is 84%. That does very roughly show that an OSX computer is more likely to be infected than a windows.

Interestingly, Vista and higher accounts for about 40% of OSs now, but only 9% of infections.

 

i'm not saying he had plastic surgery so he could become white, what i'm saying is he had so many physical changes that it resulted in him being white.

regardless, thats besides the point

 

Does anyone else remember Michael Jackson when he was just a Paedophile? Great music before mind you. Off the wall, Thriller are just classics but the rest went down hill coincidently when he started fiddlin' about.

Yes I know it was way off topic and had no link whatsoever with everything else but the last few posts made me think of that. Sorry, if I offend anyone.

On topic, is it good that Windows 7 doesn't get a mention or is that included in Vista or Higher?

 

because win7 is bad ass!

 

Symantec want's to sell their AV-software to Apple-users and heavily tweaked the numbers. There's no other sources that can confirm this findings and all the current news you can find are based on these Smantec-numbers allthough all other big AV-software-companies making products for MacOS aswell, like Avast, Clam, F-Secure, Kaspersky, Sophos, etc, etc...

I's called viral marketing.