As an IT consultant in Sydney, Australia, i look after several clients. One client has a user in the US who emailed this week stating that his computer had sent a couple of messages all by itself and that it seems like a worm or something. he asked me to let him know if there was anything he should be doing at this end to deal with it.
He provided a copy of the message and confirmed that the recipient had not received the message. i checked the server and could not find any trace of it being sent or received.
I emailed back confirming that it is possible that it is some sort of worm or virus and could he run full virus scan of his PC.
The response i received a couple of hours later was: “I use an Apple MacBook and therefore don’t use antivirus software.”
…well, we know the rest of this story, don’t we? -Rob
I wouldn’t be shocked at this. I’ve been using Macs since 1989, and have owned 5 since 1999. I’ve known hundreds of other Apple users, read message forums constantly, and only in the last year have I heard of actual users being infected with viruses. Sure, they always could get viruses, but it’s not unreasonable for most Mac users to have felt a false sense of security based on a very solid history.
it’s not the history in most cases, it comes down to someone, somewhere told them that mac’s can’t get viruses. while the company may have never come out and said that directly, they have never said otherwise either. all the track record proves is that hacker go after the market leader, which for years has been windows. the same could be said about any Unix based OS, but they are not immune to attack, they just don’t have many attacks targeted at them.
With Apple more popular than ever, it’s only a matter of time before more and more viruses are targeted towards them. Look out hipsters!