Mysterious Mac Malware Has Infected Victims for Years

Re:Mysterious Mac Malware Has Infected Victims for Years by pdeuchler on Monday July 24, 2017 @06:26PM (#14843316)

Well, what is true is that it's extremely hard to execute arbitrary code without user knowledge on a Mac. Windows has thousands upon thousands of arbitrary code execution bugs where simply opening something like a pdf can allow an attacker to run arbitrary code as a privileged user. There are many defense mechanisms to this that are inherent to the design and implementation of Darwin/Mac OS.

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Re:Mysterious Mac Malware Has Infected Victims for Years by dingo_bat on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @12:12AM (#14845071)

I don't think that's been true since windows 7. Almost all new viruses rely on user stupidity.

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Re:Mysterious Mac Malware Has Infected Victims for Years by munin on Monday July 24, 2017 @06:43PM (#14843424)

> There are many defense mechanisms to this that are inherent to the design and implementation of Darwin/Mac OS.

Do you have an example? Beyond the idea of user/root separation, which doesn't really do much for modern single user computers: https://xkcd.com/1200/

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Re:Mysterious Mac Malware Has Infected Victims for Years by pdeuchler on Monday July 24, 2017 @07:13PM (#14843602)

Kinda unfair to not let me use the biggest example (DAC/user separation) just because there might be sensitive data with user permissions when we're talking about arbitrary code execution. Even still, such a concept makes privilege execution orders of magnitude harder on * nix systems.

POSIX philosophy also prevents the "keys to the kingdom" kind of exploits you can get in windows, many linux exploits are much harder to chain together simply due to this.

The * nix networking stack has always been much more mature and robust than the windows stack, although I'll admit that's not necessarily inherent to the design.

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Re:Mysterious Mac Malware Has Infected Victims for Years by pjmlp on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @02:13AM (#14845499)

Virus were invented on UNIX.

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Re:Mysterious Mac Malware Has Infected Victims for Years by kenferry on Monday July 24, 2017 @10:03PM (#14844506)

Sandboxing. All third party apps in the Mac app store, and many system apps. Safari, Mail, Messages, FaceTime, Calendar, Contacts, Photos, Notes, and Reminders are all sandboxed.

I also really like how Gatekeeper ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatekeeper_(macOS) ) works – it quarantines documents such as word files, so that on first open you get a dialog pointing out that it's been downloaded. This is great, because you see the dialog very infrequently. I actually pay attention to it when it comes up.

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Re:Mysterious Mac Malware Has Infected Victims for Years by munin on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @05:50PM (#14852192)

Windows also does sandboxing.

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