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Re: Virex
Hi,
I've browsed quite a few Mac user discussion forums over the years and the general consensus seems to be that installing Mac antivirus products gives you a huge net productivity loss, and maybe negative security.
The OS isn't *completely unvirus-able* but stuff can't just install itself at random and for a virus to really do anything (as with any UNIX system) it would need root privileges which would usually involve the user authenticating it with an admin password.
If you're using Safari as a browser you'll want to turn off the 'Open safe files after downloading' option in general preferences which will avoid files downloading themselves through Safari and opening. This won't do much harm anyway except for the dmg image exploit that caused a kernel panic.
Using a nice and secure browser like Safari (with prefs properly set) and a good firewall (I.E. the hardware firewall built into the Sky router) means that people can't just gain access and transmit viruses to your computer as can happen on windows unfirewalled. As long as you don't install any software that you think could be suspicious and especially don't authenticate anything to install unless you know exactly what it is means that it's highly unlikely a virus can do any harm.
There are no OS X viruses 'in the wild', there have just been proof-of-concepts that barely did harm anyway and had no way of self-replication.
This concept of security-through-obscurity is complete rubbish, the fact that OS X remains unharmed by viruses must surely give hackers a huge incentive to be the first, instead of being forgotten among the 100,000 windows virii.
I think Sky just provide Virex so that if anyone ever did get some kind of malicious software, they can't sue Sky over it.
To conclude, Macs DONT need antivirus. I've run my iBook for 2 years now and the only thing that's caused me system problems have been buggy software titles that did have root-level privileges that sometimes caused a crash every so often. An antivirus program like Virex is likely to have some bugs in it that could lead to this kind of thing so I think you'd be better of without.
Of course if you're bothered about the safety of Windows users you'll want to scan files before you email them etc., and something like ClamXAV to do the occasional system scan could be useful. You won't want anything like Virex if it gets as tied-in with the system as some windows antivirus products I've experienced do (not mentioning any names *cough* Norton).
Personally I'm downloading VirusScan (which is the one for Tiger) now, to see if you can install it to use just as a scanner when needed, as a free commercial product is a free commercial product. I'm noticing that Sky's server is horrendously slow :P getting 30KB/s.
Last edited by biscuit; 25-05-07 at 09:26 PM.
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- No problems with updating and now able to check files for viruses.
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