QUESTION about viruses

Are some viruses made to eliminte competition? for example: Everyone says that Mac is safer than Microsoft. But that may be because Mac hires hackers to send viruses to Mircrosoft and make people think Microsoft's products are much more unsafe, and is bad quality.

Is this true? I heard this when a guy came to repair my computer from the Blast Worm virus.

[temi]

I'm sure your theory is correct but I think people who want to show off their skills write most viruses, It’s highly unlikely that one major company would create virus just to attach competion's products.

I agree with Temi. Could be.
But only thinking about it, let you imagine one kind of digital war :armada38: .

Ina

Temi,

I think you are right, anyway, I think that if a person want to show that he is a good coder it's better to create a good program and even to give him for free that create a virus.

Ovi

why would someone like apple want to make people think computers were unsafe. they are in the market of selling computers, and convincing people that even the competitions computers are unsafe may scare away some potentional buyers. i think the real people who are set to make money from virus are the people with virus combating software such as norton. do i think they make virus and send them out? not at all. there are plenty of nasty people in the world who do that sort of thing for fun. why? because they can.

I totally agree with monkey.

Ovi

hmm.... guys, from what monkey said, Apple would just luv to make ppl think that Microsoft software CPU's are unsafe, so that they eliminate competition, slowly, but effectively. REally, I think this might be happening, and althou most hackers out there are for showing off their skills, you gotta remember, that also many of the hackers are also sick bastrds who only want money, and they do the dirty work for either Apple/Microsoft. This is just a hypothesis of mine, but I think this might really be happening...

The only reason that Mac isn't riddled with virus' is no self respecting hacker n00b would waste his/her time to infect 5% of the market share (or whatever it is). If Mac were ever to actually compete against PC's for home computer sales you can bet the number of virus's written for Mac would increase ten fold.

Similarily, this is why a lot of people prefer Firefox to IE. Right now Firefox doesn't have a lot of spyware or malicious code searching to screw up your web browser. That will change should Firefox ever gain popularity in the realm of IE.

BTW, some spyware removal tools such as SpwareBlaster already protect you even if you use Firefox so there is code out there, just not too much of it at present time.

You are right Duke, if the company became very big anso the hackers try to hack your OS. But anyway, as an example Linux don't have this problems with virus, and if you know to configure well linux (Fedora Core) as a workstation you will not have problems. I have used and I was very happy with it.

Ovi

I've heard that Linux is a great platform to use but it can be very tricky (and time consuming) to configure properly. Is that the case?