A chilling thought...

[longmover]

There have been lots of threads about viruses targeting macs and will windows on a mac make them more susceptible etc but something occurred to me earlier which made me a little uncomfortable.

What about a windows based virus designed to attack/damage mac hardware?

This is pure speculation but because of the vast array of different types of hardware used in PC's there is no standard and therefore no common configuration for virus writers to code for. With windows (and all it's insecurities) now running on standardised mac hardware is it not now more likely that a malicious hardware specific virus could emerge which only affects macs? For example a virus which screws about with the clock speeds of the graphics chip and ramps it up to melting point?

I hope I'm wrong..!

 

[Shadow]

Doesnt hardware have built-in measures to stop this kinda thing (ie execute disable bit, shutdown at certain temperature, ect)?

 

[dmw007]

Doesnt hardware have built-in measures to stop this kinda thing (ie execute disable bit, shutdown at certain temperature, ect)?

Yes, I believe that it does.

 

[2ndPath]

I don't think intel macs will really make a difference here. Although there are almost infinitely many configurations of pc hardware, nowadays a larger number of them has very similar hardware. Looking at notbook hardware, for example, shows that a very large number of them uses pentium m or core duo/solo CPU plus an intel, ati or nvidia GPU. The differences between these systems are not all that big. Then they probably outnumber macs by a factor of at least 20. And this is assuming that all Macs would run windows.

 

[longmover]

Ok fair points, perhaps I panicked a bit too much there.

Imagine somthing finding it's way into the EFI via windows though, could be pretty nasty...

 

[andiwm2003]

Ok fair points, perhaps I panicked a bit too much there.

Imagine somthing finding it's way into the EFI via windows though, could be pretty nasty...

there are as many identical dell machines out as there are identical mac's running windows. nobody has attacked successfully the dell hardware, nobody will destroy mac's.

both will overheat and fail on their own.

 

[kouljackson]

i don't understand the point in attacking Mac systems with viruses. Even with Apple's amazing growth you'd still be attacking a minority of the worlds computer population...attack the eMachines, that's were the money is.