Question by IMAQT: Can my mac get a virus or spyware from downloading a filesharing appliation to download music files?
is it safe, or could it be harmful to my macbook?
im not talking about i tunes. referring to Poisened
i thot macs dont get spyware?
Best answer:
Answer by Ron M
Yes!
Add your own answer in the comments!
Yes, Mac don’t get many viruses, but I,ve seen on here two Mac with smitfraud.
Sorry mate your wrong; smitfraud is a form of spyware.
No P2P program is safe no matter what your downloading.
Yes and no. Macs running OS X can still download Windows viruses, they just won’t do anything, so you’re safe from viruses doing any harm to your system. The only problem is you can still pass those viruses on to your friends who are running Windows through email, file transfers, etc. To keep that from happening get a virus scanner from here: http://www.pure-mac.com/virus.html
Having said that, OS X isn’t exactly impenetrable; no OS is. There are ways that people can find out your IP address, for instance, and then use that to connect to your laptop if you aren’t protected somehow. You definitely want to have the firewall on, select “set access for specific services and applications,” and set it to Stealth Mode, which will make sure any uninvited traffic trying to connect to you receives no response back and is unable to connect. You can then allow whichever applications you want to receive connections and block whichever ones you don’t.
If you’re just downloading music, you should be fine. I seem to remember reading somewhere that it’s impossible to attach malicious code to an audio file, though I’m not 100% sure about that. In any case, I’ve used Limewire for almost a year on my MacBook Pro and I’ve never had any problems. Just don’t download any MOV files, because those can have codes attached to them which will open up one or more sites in your browser when you play them.
No as to viruses, there are no released MacOs X viruses. As to spyware, no, malware yes. There is one Mac malware which you get on porn sites but you have to agree to install it and your Mac asks you for your password to do so. If someone attached it to music file, you would still have to agree to install it.
well, apple computers are less vounerable to viruses because windows use .exe and appples dont so it isnt very likely