Replies

• 1

  Stephen Curry

  20 February 2009 | 16:08

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  You should definitely have something – it can only be a matter of time. I have Norton Antivirus (our university provides a site licence).

  Don’t know about anti-spyware or anti-malware. Strange that I haven’t thought about it since they are absolutely required on our home PC.

• 2

  Maxine Clarke

  20 February 2009 | 17:15

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  From the Macophiles at work (they are few but very intense) I gather there are good Mac users’ discussion boards for this type of issue. Mac users seem to form a much tighter community than us PC users – I will ask around and see if I can get a recommendation of a good group, if you don’t know of one already.

• 3

  Stephen Curry

  20 February 2009 | 17:37

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  Or, just ask Martin…

• 4

  Richard Grant

  21 February 2009 | 05:16

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  Actually Stephen, no: you shouldn’t have anything.

  There would be great kudos in the virus-writing world if someone got a successful Mac virus into the wild. After… what? eight years of OS X such a thing still does not exist. The underlying architecture of the system makes it almost impossible for it to exist. There are exploits, and bad things can happen: but these are almost 100% social engineering tricks—like making the user install malicious software, etc. There was a reasonably serious Safari RSS vulnerability a couple of weeks back, but I don’t actually know that anyone was affected by it, and it’s been patched now.

  Keep your security updates up-to-date (Apple make this stupidly easy), your firewall on, and use secure passwords (they say you shouldn’t use an admin account as your main account but actually, if the password is reasonable and you don’t install software from non-trusted sites you should be fine) and you won’t have problems. If something asks for your password and you weren’t expecting it, be suspicious.

  Anti-virus software will simply add overhead to your system that you can do without.

• 5

  Henry Gee

  21 February 2009 | 07:18

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  As Richard said. Push out your chest, keep your buttocks resolutely clenched, and you’ll be all right.

• 6

  Stephen Curry

  21 February 2009 | 17:42

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  I believe every word Richard but…

  …nothing is impossible and I’m not about to uninstall the software. For sure it’s a world away from the average PC user experience (I should know – two major infections of our home PC in the past year) but I’ll pay the overhead.

• 7

  Martin Fenner

  21 February 2009 | 23:40

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  Just as Cath I do believe that one day we will have Mac viruses. For now it’s not really an issue. But don’t forget the virus software for the Windows you run on your Mac with Boot Camp, VMWare Fusion or Parallels.

• 8

  Cath Ennis

  23 February 2009 | 20:08

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  Thanks all! I don’t run Windows on the Mac (although that might change if the desktop PC dies), but I’ll follow Richard’s advice and keep my ears open.

  The problem is determining which are the non-trustworthy sites. I’ll just make sure not to let my husband do anything on the Mac – he’s pretty much a complete newbie and has a tendency to click on pop-up windows that tell him his system is under threat, and on emails that purport to be from the bank. Don’t worry, the retraining is going well!

• 9

  Richard Grant

  24 February 2009 | 05:10

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  “The problem is determining which are the non-trustworthy sites.”

  …

  We’re talking about that elsewhere…

• 10

  Cath Ennis

  25 February 2009 | 06:42

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  wait, what? Are you comparing religion to a virus? How very… Dawkins.