Mac Anti-Virus? Is it really needed?

Comments 18 October 2009

For the short few years I have been using Macs I never encountered or even heard of a virus infecting the Mac OS X operating system. While doing the research for a previous post about an open source anti-virus application for Windows users I came across ClamXav.

ClamXav is a free virus checker for Mac OS X. It uses the tried, tested and very popular ClamAV open source antivirus engine as a back end. Before OS X the number of viruses which attacked Macintosh users totaled somewhere between about 60 and 80. Today, apparently there are no viruses actively attacking OS X users.

However, this doesn’t mean we should get complacent about checking incoming email attachments or web downloads, for two reasons. Firstly, there’s no guarantee that we Mac users will continue to enjoy the status quo, but more importantly, the majority of the computing world use machines running MS Windows, for which an enormous quantity of viruses exist, so we must be vigilant in checking the files we pass on to our friends and colleagues etc.

Do you, as a Mac user, use any anti-spyware or anti-virus programs? Would love to know how many of you there are out there who use anti-virus for mac. Do we just trust that the server that host our email to scan and block the messages with their own anti-virus before we download them and are we smart enough in our browsing patterns to stay away from spyware infected sites?

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Rafiq Phillips

Rafiq Phillips - who has written 1081 posts on Web AddiCT(s);.

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Tim Gregory

I don't use any anti-virus on my Mac. In fact, one of the reasons I moved from a PC to a Mac at work was that McAfee was so slooow and bogged my Windows XP down so badly.
Why would I inflict that on myself again on a Mac?

LouisinLondon

In London many Universities use Symantec for Anti-Virus on Apple Mac's.
As you note this is not required.

I have some bookmarks on my work computer which I will add here tomorrow which gives a even better insight to part viruses or worms which were available for Mac, but almost never seen in the wild.

I personally like the idea of running a Antivirus on my Mac which TARGETS WINDOWS viruses, since it uses the (*mostly inadequate) Signature files for Windows viruses.

This allows me to Clean or remove viruses from people's external hard-drives and memory sticks (way too often) - and then tell them that we will be re-imaging their machine, and that they should start backing up their data in the mean while.

You see on a Windows PC it is impossible to confirm that the machine is clean after an infection - the only way to be sure is a low level format and a clean install.
This came from the mouth of one of Microsoft's lead security Specialists - Believe it was Mark Russinovich. [I'll have to provide the link I presume - tomorrow]

Corporately paying for a piece of software such as Symantec isn't my idea, but contracts are contracts. ClamXAV is great since it's got a low memory footprint and is free...

Linux users can be good netcitizens by installing ClamAV
http://www.clamav.net/download/packages/package... and try to save those poor souls still dependent on Windows.

Foot note : Vista and Win7 makes life a bit better for Savvy users, but for normal users unfortunately Viruses and worms still get in. (It's the foundation that is bad, and you know what they say about foundations)