Mac and Linux are rarely attacked by viruses.

Larry Seltzer, editor of The eWEEK Security Center, expressed his views on why Mac and Linux are rarely attacked by viruses while Windows is attacked by viruses.

He said the recent appearance of a malicious script against Mac OS X made him feel a little uneasy. Although this malicious script is not a great threat because it does not have a propagation mechanism, it is a real worm tool developed using social engineering. If the script requires the Administrator's root access, even if the Mac user runs as a low-Permission user, all the attack has to do is get the root password. Unless the user has an independent administrator to manage the computer, he must have a root password to complete some inevitable tasks, such as installation programs and devices. Community engineering is the key to most attacks.

Email worms like Beagle currently only affect Windows. Why? E-Mail executable attachments are for specific platforms, and their authors did not write them for less popular platforms, because the number of platforms greatly reduces the possibility of recipients being infected. This is the so-called "low-profile security ". The only reason for protecting Linux and Mac OS from attacks is that it is not worth doing this kind of thing. This is also true for espionage and advertising. Of course, hackers can write viruses targeting Mac and Linux, and have achieved success.

Currently, the most interesting threats are already cross-platform. Web fraud attacks are technically simple and rely entirely on the trust of people. Therefore, users on other platforms will find that they will also be involved in attacks previously limited to Windows platforms.