Non-Windows Viruses

Apple Macintosh

There are plenty of viruses around that affect Apples, and as the Mac also has a version of Microsoft Office available on it, you need to also be aware that your Mac may be somewhat vulnerable to office macro viruses. The good news here is that most macro virus writers do not know much about the Mac, and so you don't have to worry about the payload. 

The way files are handled on a Mac is different from how it all works on a PC so the tricks these people tend to use will not work on a Mac. This means your biggest problem from the "average" macro virus is the embarrassment of sending it to others. Of course, for a business with a reputation to protect, embarrassing yourselves by sending an infected file to a customer is considered a bad enough problem as it is.

To learn more about Mac viruses I suggest the following links:

David Harley maintains a pretty good set of pages about virus issues in general which includes a section on Mac security and viruses. He is a co-maintainer of the "viruses and the Mac" FAQ www.sherpasoft.com/index.html. Also see www.macvirus.com Maintained by Susan Lesch, one of the co-maintainers of the "viruses and the Mac" FAQ. 

Linux (and other flavours of Unix) 

Well Linux is a Unix variant and there have been one or two viruses for Unix and also a couple that specifically target Linux. These are not in the wild and are not likely to be.. they are what I personally refer to as "concept" viruses;  they exist to prove it can be done. 

One thing to keep in mind is that if a Unix system is set up and run in a proper manner, it should be fairly immune to viruses spreading too far because of user rights, security settings etc. much the same as it is under NT (notice how all the NT specific viruses such as remote explorer rely on someone with administrator type rights logging on to the machine before they can do anything interesting?) 

The main virus problems on Unix are two-fold. Firstly, Unix servers are often used as network file servers for a PC network. This means that infected items may be stored on the server, and while this poses no threat to the server itself, it obviously has the potential to allow a virus to spread quickly round an organisation. 

Secondly, quite a lot of Unix servers are based on Intel X86 hardware, same as Windows PCs. This means that a Unix or Linux or Windows NT or OS/2 server using this hardware is just as vulnerable to boot sector viruses as a dos or windows based system. Some would say the problem is slightly worse for any of these platforms as recovery is often a little more difficult due to the fact that disk systems like NFS, NTFS or HPFS do not exactly lend themselves to the user booting off a dos floppy and hacking around and fixing the problem in the traditional way.

Update

Since writing this article, we've seen a fair amount of Linux worms hit the headlines, such as LION, and the Ramen Noodles worm. What price the "Virus proof" operating system now? Whatever Operating System you use, you need to watch what you are doing.

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