Virus and/or hacks

[jbcohen]

Has anyone heard of any electronic reader getting a virus or hacked? By the term hack I do not mean that if you buy a reader and hack into it yourself I mean a hack by someone other than the owner of the reader. Has anyone had a reader that caught a virus or been hacked?

[HarryT]

The file system of a reader (ie the drive that mounts on a PC) can certainly become a "host" to a virus, which has the potential to then infect any PC that it's plugged into. This is no different to a virus being spread by, say, a USB memory stick.

[Hellmark]

However, the possibility of an ereader itself becoming a host, and not just a carrier, is extremely low. Too small of a target base. Not only do you have so few people, relatively, using ereaders but the market is also fragmented. Maybe if there was only one brand or model of reader...

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

However, the possibility of an ereader itself becoming a host, and not just a carrier, is extremely low.

I totally agree. But one should exercise caution when connecting any storage device to an unknown PC.

[jbcohen]

Certainly a Kindle can get a virus but has anyone heard of this occuring? I do not beleive that virus writing has gotten that far. Also due to the popularity the Kindle can become a victim of its own scucess. If I am a virus writer and I am going to target electronic book readers which one am I going to target? A Kobo? Probably not since I proably have never heard of one and even if I have it doesn;t have enough market share to make it worth my while. I am most likely going to attack a Kindle since its got a large market share, a biger payload. There has been some attacks on blackberries for the same reason and I am hearing of a few attacks on Android phones and most certainly I am hearing of a lot of attacks on iphones, becuase they are apple.

[Hellmark]

Viruses can be made for anything. With all the hacking that has been done on the Kindle, a virus could definitely be made for it, however, is it worth the time to do it? What would you do? Brick it? And how fast could you get it to spread? probably very slow due to the number of kindles out there. Why hit thousands when you can hit millions or billions? Even though viruses hit only a small portion of a population, but due to the immense size, such as with windows users, that is still a lot of victims. Not only that, but those victims have more interactions with other potential victims, when compared to a kindle.

Also, few viruses are written for Macs, due to how few macs are out there comparatively. Yeah, there are millions out there, but it is still under 10% of the market. An infected machine needs contact with another infectable machine in order to spread the infection, and there is still few mac to mac interactions overall.

[jbcohen]

All true except over the past ten to fifteen years Microsoft has made major improvements in security to the point that a Mac is a much easier target then a Microsoft based one is, as a consequence apple gets most of the hacks. At my office there are millions of Windows PCs all around the nation and a probably twenty macs nationwide. My pals tell me that of the last thirty cyber break ins twnety nine have been mac based and one was Windows based. The windows one did not get very far and the mac ones wound up shutting down all of the office's macs for three weeks.

[Hellmark]

I actually have to laugh at that. Most of the work that Microsoft has done in recent history, has simply been doing what the competition has been doing already since day one.

For instance, MacOS and Linux have long been multiuser OS's, and they restrict the primary users to not be able to do system wide changes. It wasn't until Vista that MS had a multiuser OS that by default did not allow the user to have full access to the system. The requests for authorization anytime an app requests something that can be potentially damaging? Yeah, the others have been doing that for way longer.

As far as the attacks on the macs at your office, I find that highly suspect. As someone who works in the IT field, and studies it regularly, that goes against the norm. I guess that would just go possibly to the idea that the problem exists between keyboard and chair. If you run a system in an insecure way, you're prone to get attacked. For instance, has the systems been recently updated? If you don't keep up on updates, you're going to have a system that has known security holes, and those are frequently targeted for direct attack. Once something can be exploited, black hats have zombies scan through IP ranges, trying to find exploitable computers, and then they attack them. If you don't update your system, then it is not a problem of the OS that it was targeted and attacked, but rather your own. This goes for all OS's, and my thought is that since your company has so many Windows machines and so few macs, they push out the regular updates to the system, apps, and antivirus to each machine automatically, and do not have something of the sort on the macs, requiring manual intervention to do so and that is probably not being done. Why do I suspect that? Because on average, your claims go against the norm for MacOS. And that is if the claims are 100% true, and not embellished any at all.

[elcreative]

Nice unattributed anecdotal evidence... well, two can play that game... far more of my clients and friends have Win PCs than Macs and in more than twenty five years, I've dealt with two infected Macs (back in the early 90's) and lost count of the PCs because I've dealt with viral, trojan and worm attacks several times a month on the Win PCs.

In any case, ending up with any computer system down for three weeks tends to smack of tech support incompetence...

And to get back to the OP, in three and a half years of eReader usage (various), never come across a live attack on anything...

Originally Posted by jbcohen

All true except over the past ten to fifteen years Microsoft has made major improvements in security to the point that a Mac is a much easier target then a Microsoft based one is, as a consequence apple gets most of the hacks. At my office there are millions of Windows PCs all around the nation and a probably twenty macs nationwide. My pals tell me that of the last thirty cyber break ins twnety nine have been mac based and one was Windows based. The windows one did not get very far and the mac ones wound up shutting down all of the office's macs for three weeks.