🚀 go-pugleaf

adam@endor.uucp (Adam Shostack) writes:

> available utility.  While I'm not as familiar with the PC world, there
> seem to be at least 50 major strains of viruses, and I don't know of
> any single program which can stop all of them.

:-). You are off by a factor of ten... Currently we recognize at least
592 different virus families for MS-DOS... They might be slightly more
- something about 600, but you get the idea... The last time I looked,
there were only about 35 different viruses for the Mac...

> Does anyone care to comment on why there are so many more MS-Dos
> viruses out there, and there doesn't seem to be any universally
> accepted tool (like Disinfectant) to stop viruses.  Or is this a false
> impression because I use a mac and have taken the time to find out
> about the tools available?

I really don't know why there are fewer Mac viruses than MS-DOS
ones... The difference in the spread of the two types of computers is
not significant enough to explain the huge difference in the numbers
of the existing viruses... Maybe, due to the different price, the two
kinds of computers are just owned by different kinds of people... My
boss says that the Mac owners love their machines (unlike the IBM PC
owners who hate theirs <grin>), that's why they tend not to write
destructive code from them... :-) This was a joke, please don't start
a flame war.

You are right that in the MS-DOS world there is no program that can
stop all known viruses. The reason is that there is not such thing as
"all known viruses". New viruses for the IBM PC appear everagely 2-3
per day. Nobody can update their anti-virus programs that fast.

Another thing that makes me wonder is why most Mac viruses are pretty
silly. OK, some of them have the equivalent of tunneling, but none of
the advanced techniques used in MS-DOS like stealth, armour, slow
infection, sparse infection, polymorphism, and so on are used... OK,
stealth is probably not easy, having in mind how MacOS works, slow and
sparce infections are not needed, since integrity checkers are not
used much, but why not polymorphism? It is much easier to do with the
690x0 CPU than it is to do it with 80x86...

Regards,
Vesselin

P.S. This discussion probably belongs to comp.virus.
-- 
Vesselin Vladimirov Bontchev          Virus Test Center, University of Hamburg
Tel.:+49-40-54715-224, Fax: +49-40-54715-226      Fachbereich Informatik - AGN
< PGP 2.1 public key available on request. > Vogt-Koelln-Strasse 30, rm. 107 C
e-mail: bontchev@fbihh.informatik.uni-hamburg.de    D-2000 Hamburg 54, Germany