Quote:
Originally Posted by RogueAI
I honestly do not know much about how viruses work so I wanted to make sure that even if they did become extremely common on Mac as they are on Windows they would not become common on whatever OS I switched to.
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A true virus, generally operates like a biological virus in a way: it infects files be injecting itself into that file. Viruses range from targeting to executables all the way to attacking the computers master boot records. In fact, an early computer virus did just that (
link;search for Motorola).
Under a UNIX based operating system or a properly managed Windows NT based operating system, the damage that can be done is limited. Things the virus can exploit to gain additional privileges or even some setuid executables are you bigger concern.
In my experience, most Windows users still do not understand the concept of file system permissions and have used Windows XPs 5~6 year migration path to wallow in their idiocy as permitted by Microshaft Marketing -- resulting in a user base that thrives on making systems even more subspectible to compromise by malicious people, let along malicious software!
In the unix world, such users are somewhere between retard and brain damaged fool. But represent a much much smaller minority here then "Over there" with the masses.
I have never had a confirmed virus infection on any of my machines and it has been many years since any malicious program was detected on my Windows machines. The difference between sanity and insanity....