"2012 saw 600,000 Macs worldwide infected with the Flashback Trojan although personally I dont know anyone who was infected by it. This is the most well known attack I am aware of."
There's a very good reason You don't personally know anyone who was infected by the Flashback Trojan, Simon: it was a HOAX perpetrated by Dr. Web, a Russian Anti-Virus software publisher who was trying to sell their new Mac Anti-virus for Business app. Dr. Web Claimed to have what they claimed was a honey-pot server they had built to intercept the "infected" Macs as they "called home for instructions" from the malicious server of the bad guys. . . but that was NOT actually what they had. Instead of a honey-pot, they had a server with a list of Mac UUID's of 600,000 Macs, many of which had never had Java installeda requirement to be infected, ever been sold yet, or in many instances, even been manufactured yet! Many of the so-called "infected" Macs whose UUID's were on Dr. Webs' so-called honey-pot's list of infected Macs were found to be NOT infected, did not have Java installed (Java was not a default install on OS X), and some had not even been on the Internet to even be infected at all! In fact, NOT A SINGLE INFECTED MAC was ever found in the wild!
At the time that Dr. Web announced their finding of this 600,000 MacBot, the vulnerability that Flashback Trojan utilized had been CLOSED for over six months and Apple had the Trojan's signature in its Gatekeeper for that entire length of time. To even GET infected with this supposed Trojan, all 600,000 Macs would have to have visited an obscure Russian language website and downloaded character definitions for a Russian language role-playing game that had only had under 20,000 downloads of the game. . . but they would have us believe that under 20,000 game players of a Russian language game somehow persuaded 600,000 English-only-speaking Mac users in America and the UK (95% of the supposed infected machines were apparently located in the US and the balance were in Canada and the OK, and only 2% were Windows machines????) to connect to download malware loaded character definitions for the game???? I really don't think so.
In any case, within a week of Dr. Web's hyped announcement of 600,000 infected Macs, the number claimed had dropped to under 250,000, then later that week to under 180,000, then later to under 120,000, then under 86,000 then dropped completely off the news cycle as NO ONE FOUND any infected Macs in the wild!
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I’ve been running several flavors of Linux since 1994. Have yet to have a virus infection on one of them.
Root kits? Might have had one. Not sure about that.
Never had a adware attack.
But I do not use Adobe Flash. Most of the time I only enable the minimum java needed to render the screen.
Latest install is set up to use TLS only secure shell when logging in.
Am pretty happy with this install. Debian with XFCE packages.
I've used Windows for 20 years.
If the author used Windows, and if the author followed his own advice, he would have had almost no problems with Windows, either.
I've had 4 viruses in 20 years. Two of them after opening or downloading Adobe documents.
I currently have a virus that attacks and shuts down my McAfee firewall and gives me a pop-up that wants me to download a software program.
I've done a half dozen full computer scans, and I have no idea where this thing is hiding, or where it came from.
Intel has purchased McAfee, and a few weeks ago they shut down the McAfee Help Desk and the User Chat Room, so I don't even know how to alert McAfee to the problem.
There are many posts on Google about this pop-up, and many very complicated suggestions about how to stop it, but there is no way to verify these solutions, so I have not tried any of them.
So, obviously, Windows is not perfect, but 4 viruses in 20 years, for the most widely used desktop OS in the world, is not a bad record, either.
I can't tell me who much time I used to spend just cleaning up Windows, it was at least once a month. You shouldn't have to run all of these programs just to keep the system stable.