Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 26 November 2008 03:03
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
Think you don't need antivirus software on your Mac? Apple begs to differ.
One subject practically guaranteed to cause passionate debate among Mac users is antivirus software. And just to stave off any unnecessary argument here, we're really talking about anti-malware as traditional viruses are relatively thin on the ground these days.
One school of thought basically says there's very little malware around that affects Mac OS X, and what there is can be easily avoided by watching out for tricks such as movies that claim to require special codecs.
So they'll sit out current versions of antivirus software, but by and large they keep an open mind and are prepared to make a purchase if and when there's a serious outbreak.
The other camp has two concerns. One is that the sending and receiving of files carries a risk of acting as a Typhoid Mary in passing infected files between Windows users. As mentioned above, file infectors aren't as common as they used to be, but every now and then a Word document (for example) containing a macro virus will appear in someone's inbox.
The other is that when (and they generally think in terms of when rather than if) an outbreak occurs, they stand more chance of avoiding it if antivirus software is already installed and updating itself at frequent intervals.
They fear that by the time the other group hears about the outbreak, purchases, installs and updates an antivirus program, it could be too late.
So what's the latest word from Apple on the subject? Please
read on.
