and search under 'Mac', you'll find several of the little darlings. I think the real answer why there aren't very many is that if you're a nasty, spotty virus programmer who wants to ruin as many people's days as possible, then you will hit a lot more people (and thus get a lot more satisfaction) going for PCs than for Macs.

This program will repair your computer if you get to it quick enough.

Distribution is pretty much the same, but this one will erase the boot sector of your system disc, erase the CMOS RAM and flash-wipe your BIOS. I've been emailed with it twice in the last three months - suddenly, spending that £60 on Norton Antivirus seemed very worthwhile...

It'll install an extension in your System folder that will REinstall itself if you try to delete it. From there it will progressively scramble your menu bars in several applications until they become completely unusable. After that it'll start messing up files on the hard drive. The only way to get rid of it is to erase and reinstall, from scratch, all the applications on your hard drive because it appends it to the resource fork of each file.

I say there are two reasons why there aren't that many "good" viruses for the Mac. One is, just as you said, there aren't enough machines out there for Macs to be a good target. The other reason is that it's just that much harder to write them for the Mac. Those programmers that are willing to jump through all the hoops necessary to become a good programmer are probably the ones with the moral judgement to know that writing viruses is bad. Even if they don't have higher moral standards, you can look at it from the standpoint of, "I spent all this time and energy to learn the Mac OS so I'm not going to waste my time dicking around writing viruses when I could be making money." (Good Mac programmers can pull down some serious cash! )

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Do you nose who might be responsible for this?

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