Macs and Macros - the State of the Macintosh Nation

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, without the prior written permission of the publishers. ABSTRACT The Apple Macintosh has received little recent attention from virus writers or, indeed, anti-virus researchers. Though the number of native Mac viruses has stayed virtually static for several years, the recent upsurge of macro viruses has not left the Macintosh community unscathed. Many viruses which infect Microsoft Office applications will do so as happily on a Macintosh as on a PC. Even Mac users who don't use vulnerable applications or application versions may, without appropriate anti-virus software, unknowingly pass on infected files. Many Mac sites, however, are only just waking up to these facts, belatedly and expensively. This paper briefly reviews the shared history of viruses and the Mac, summarizes the current situation and considers future possibilities and strategies. 1 INTRODUCTION The Macintosh platform doesn't seem to interest virus-writers or anti-virus vendors much. While the number of PC viruses continues to rise dramatically, the number of Macintosh-specific viruses has been stalled (for years, literally) at around 35, some only a significant threat on older systems running versions of Mac OS earlier than System 7. On the anti-virus side, several companies have abandoned the Mac and only one major player has actually launched a known-virus scanner for the Mac in the last two years. Traditionally, most Mac users have been content to rely on the freeware package Disinfectant, and/or the postcardware package Gatekeeper. Apart from system viruses and a few non-replicating Trojan Horses (which, almost by definition, usually have a fairly short shelf-life), the nearest thing to a growth industry in the land of Mac viruses was a slow trickle of Hypercard infectors-arguably the first wave of in-the-wild macro viruses, but specific to a niche product which has had more impact as a catalyst in hypermedia and multimedia than as a killer application in its own right. Summer 1995, though, shook things up somewhat with the first in-the-wild Word macro virus. From the start, there was a certain fascination with the fact that Concept and its younger siblings had the potential for infecting across hardware platforms. Unfortunately, the existence of this potential bypassed the Mac community altogether, for a while, and even now there is an assumption prevalent among Mac advocates that non-users of Word 6 need not concern themselves with what is seen …