The new story out: viruses attack your iPod! Errr… sort of. The report is that a virus app called “Podloso” now can affect your iPod directly. Providing, of course, that you are a stupendous idiot. It’s yet another proof-of-concept virus:

“We’ve seen it happen over and over in the malware world. Someone will do a test, creating a simple thing that does no real damage. Once hackers see that the approach works, they continue to tweak it and use it for malicious intent,” said Dee Liebenstein, director of product management at SecureWave, a Luxembourg vendor of security software that helps companies control when and how portable devices connect to corporate computers.

Gee whiz, another security company being the source of a bogus Apple virus threat–who’da thought?

The “approach” for this virus that hackers will follow? Well, first you have to install Linux on your iPod. Then, if the virus is on the iPod, you have to intentionally run the virus. Yeah, that “approach” should work just great! All hackers have to do is trick iPod users into installing the Linux operating system onto their computers and then installing and loading the virus after that. No problem!

The article then mentions that iPods carried a Windows virus last fall; even though they added the caveat that such a virus doesn’t actually infect or affect the iPod itself, the addition of this information in an article about an iPod “virus” only adds to the misconception that something is going to affect their iPod. In truth, the iPod as sold is completely unaffected, as it was with the Windows virus.

The problem with these “proof of concept” viruses for Apple products is that, at least so far, all of them require the user to both have some kind of unusual setup on their product, and then after that, do something monumentally stupid in order for the “virus” to work.

Plus, we’ve been hearing these reports of waves of viruses coming to Apple products for quite some time now, and still nothing has materialized. It was two and a half years ago that the rootkit “Opener” was announced, and two years since Symantec announced that “it is now clear that the Mac OS is increasingly becoming a target for the malicious activity that is more commonly associated with Microsoft and various Unix-based operating systems.” Almost a year after Symantec’s panic warning, the “first” Mac “virus” came out, except that it was actually a trojan, and required someone to click on an image and the type in user authentication to run it. If I recall correctly, all of one people were affected by it.

Viruses will eventually come for the Mac, and maybe even someday for the iPod. However, don’t let these scare articles released by self-serving anti-virus vendors trick you: so far, there is still no malware out there for Apple products that actually works worth a damn.