While Symantec yet again rang the bogus virus bell, trying to alarm people about Mac security to get them to buy Symantec software, the person who actually wrote the proof-of-concept code admitted in the source code itself that he had too much trouble making the virus work in the real world.

…the author had expressed what appears to be frustration at trying to make the virus effective on Apple’s platform.

“In the source code, which is a mish-mash of stuff, there is a comment where the author says ‘so many problems for so little code’,” he said. “So it does look as though virus writers, fortunately, still have a way to go before they are able to write Mac viruses with the proficiency and fluidity that they can for Windows.”

The Macarena “virus,” despite the author’s efforts, resulted in nothing more than the source code, with no “vector,” no workable method of spreading the virus. The malicious code simply exploits an old UNIX flaw, but the author apparently could not get the exploit past Mac OS X’s defenses.

In order for Macarena to work as written, one would have to deliberately find a web site with the source code, download it, compile it, and then run it in order for anything to happen. No wonder Symantec rates the code’s “Threat Containment” as “easy” and the “Distribution Level” as “low.”