So much for Apple's being "immune" to viruses

A curious falsehood has surrounded Mac computers over the last decade, as they have resurged onto the market.  People believe that Macs are immune to the malware, viruses, and worms that have wrought havoc on PCs. 

In reality, OS X is not much more or less secure than Windows Vista -- rather it is Apple's small market share that has protected it.  Since Mac attacks would have to be custom-made, there just hasn't been much interest among Black Hats to attack them.  Kevin Haley, a director of security response at Symantec, states, "The bad guys generally go toward the biggest target, what will get them the biggest bang for their buck."

However, with surging market share and pop icon status, the Macs are suddenly finding themselves under attack.  On the heels of Apple's announcement that customers should get an antivirus program, Apple has been attacked by what are some calling OS X's first official trojan virus. The trojan, dubbed "iBotnet", has snuck its way into several thousand Macs.  The virus is written specifically for Mac computers and does not affect Windows machines.

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A venerable OS is laid to rest -- sorta

Windows XP in its early years started off ambitious and enterprising.  However, in those early years (2001 and 2002), it also gave many a headache and received ample criticism.  With time (and Service Packs) it matured into what is today regarded as one of Microsoft's best operating system efforts of all time.

Now the time has come at last to take the first steps towards laying the OS to rest.  While sales of XP-downgraded computers will continue after July in the case of HP, and XP will still be installed on some netbooks until 2010, Microsoft is ending mainstream support for the OS on April 14, 2009.  The first phase of the retirement comes over seven years after the first Windows XP shipped.

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"Joe Stewart from the Conficker Working Group has created an eye chart that allows for online identification of Conficker B and C infections. Using basic knowledge of the blacklisting that Conficker employs to avoid attempting to infect IPs that belong to popular Anti-Virus and security firms (including Microsoft), the group whipped up this very simple test to see if you can load content from the various pages. If you can see all of the images, you're more than likely Conficker-free. According to Honeynet, 'This detection method should be more reliable than network scanning based tests. Happy scanning!'"