If you've been following my meanderings over the past few months, you know about the Rootkit report where they say that rootkit incidents have risen 2300 percent over the past two years, and you've seen their assertion that we're on the "cusp" of a phone-borne malware attack. Of course, I don't subscribe to any of that. However, I came across this article today citing the McAfee OS X Malware paper where McAfee warns Apple users about the possibility of "chip-based" malware. Sigh.
Needless to say, I don't think this is a real possibility. We haven't seen malware propagation via a hardware vector ever and I don't think we're likely to see it start happening now. As any programmer will tell you, as more time goes by, operating systems offer fewer mechanisms for a developer to interact directly with system hardware. Since the introduction of the HAL in Windows NT, there are fewer and fewer ways for a developer to directly address hardware components from the application layer. Not to mention the fact that the number of different permutations of components makes it almost impossible to ensure compatability even on the same model system. One has to ask the question why some virus or worm would interact directly with hardware components, when it is a million times easier to propogate without doing that. So they can infect OS X? Not likely.
Posted by Ed at May 22, 2006 05:25 PM | TrackBack