There are functioning Microsoft Office trojans that can self-replicate through e-mail.
There was a largely harmless but extremely widespread trojan that did drive-by Java attacks on webpages.
Repeat the above for Flash vulnerabilities.
There was a largely harmless but extremely widespread trojan that masqueraded as a free antivirus package and guilt-tripped naive users into authenticating via Installer.app, the only programmatic way to get code onto a Mac.
Best practice in my reality:
- DO NOT INSTALL A VIDEO CODEC PACKAGE
- DO NOT RUN COPIED OR TORRENTED SOFTWARE
- Enable Firewall.
- Remove Adobe Acrobat Reader unless your PDF workflow absolutely requires it.
- Disable Java immediately. (uninstall it for extra credit)
- Make sure Flash is at the dead latest self-updating version and set to auto-update.
- Update all non-stock browsers to self-updating versions.
- Update Microsoft Office and allow it to check for updates weekly.
There are functioning Microsoft Office trojans that can self-replicate through e-mail.
There was a largely harmless but extremely widespread trojan that did drive-by Java attacks on webpages.
Repeat the above for Flash vulnerabilities.
There was a largely harmless but extremely widespread trojan that masqueraded as a free antivirus package and guilt-tripped naive users into authenticating via Installer.app, the only programmatic way to get code onto a Mac.
Best practice in my reality:
- DO NOT INSTALL A VIDEO CODEC PACKAGE
- DO NOT RUN COPIED OR TORRENTED SOFTWARE
- Enable Firewall.
- Remove Adobe Acrobat Reader unless your PDF workflow absolutely requires it.
- Disable Java immediately. (uninstall it for extra credit)
- Make sure Flash is at the dead latest self-updating version and set to auto-update.
- Update all non-stock browsers to self-updating versions.
- Update Microsoft Office and allow it to check for updates weekly.
- Allow Software Update to do its thing weekly.