Company backs off bounty for Mac OS X virus

IDG News Service - A company that offered $25,000 for the first virus that automatically spreads among Apple Computer Inc. computers running the Mac OS X operating system canceled the virus-writing contest and retracted the offer of cash, citing concerns about legal liability.
DVForge Inc. said on Saturday that it wouldn't offer cash for a Macintosh virus after legal concerns were raised about the contest and in the wake of complaints from Apple security experts. The contest was announced Friday and was intended to raise awareness of what Jack Campbell, CEO of DVForge, considers fear-mongering by antivirus company Symantec Corp.
Cupertino, Calif.-based Symantec said last week that threats to the Apple platform were on the rise (see story).
Hendersonville, Tenn.-based DVForge makes a variety of peripheral devices for Apple products, such as the JamPod, a small guitar amplifier module that plugs into iPod portable music players and allows their owners to play along with the songs stored on the device. In addition to selling products for the Apple system, the company uses Apple computers internally and is a bastion of Apple technology experts and loyalists, Campbell said.
The idea for a contest to create the first self-propagating virus for the OS X platform was the result of frustration over a widely publicized report from Symantec that said the Mac operating system is increasingly a target for malicious activity that's more commonly associated with Microsoft Corp.'s Windows and Unix-based operating systems, he said.
The Symantec warnings were baseless and intended only to "scare the hell out of people," Campbell said. Company employees, including Campbell, "lost our minds" when they read about Symantec's claims and saw the report as a threat to DVForge's business as much as Apple's.
The idea of a contest grew out of conversations with technical staff at DVForge last week and was intended to call Symantec's "bluff," Campbell said. "We have just as much incentive as Apple to fight back," he said.
The company placed two G5 PowerMac computers running OS X 10.3 Panther on the Internet and issued a statement on its Web page that challenged Internet users to create a virus that would spread between the two machines on or before July 31. In a dig at Symantec, DVForge offered double the reward, $50,000, to any employee of Symantec who won the contest, Campbell said.
Campbell was confident that the security features in OS X would prevent anyone from creating a self-propagating virus that moved between the two machines before the deadline expired, he said.
However, after word of the