Malware and protection
From MacFAQ
Contents |
Viruses
Every year nearly several thousand new viruses for the PC are discovered. The last new Macintosh virus of note was the Autostart Worm, discovered in 1998.
In 1977 the Ramones toured Europe, supported by Talking Heads. In Britain they discovered a music scene that was amongst other things notable for the custom of 'gobbing'. The Ramones attracted a sea of gob from the audiences. But when Talking Heads played the gobbing stopped. "Possibly the spitters were lurking in the back of the audience during their set," Tommy Ramone said once, "but I don't think so. They just didn't make you want to spit."
And so it is with the Mac. Possibly it's harder to write viruses for the Mac. Perhaps the kind of disaffected youth most likely to produce a virus tends to own a PC instead. But basically, the Mac just doesn't make you want to write viruses.
Mac OS X viruses
There are no known Mac OS X viruses.
Anti-virus software
You don't need to buy any anti-virus protection, really. This is because there are zero known viruses for MacOS X. Despite this there are several companies always willing to inform us that they'll be ready to handle a virus outbreak, should one ever actually occur, but until then their products are likely to cause many more difficulties than any problem they're trying to solve.
In theory there is a risk of trojans (a file which looks harmless but is actually a malicious program) but in practice, so far there have been a vanishingly small number of those either. And even those that did appear have been fairly easy to spot (a 150k Applescript file which purported to be a pre-release of the next version of Microsoft Word, for example) and all were discussed at some length on all the Mac news sites.
There have been a small number of proofs-of-concept (a web page which downloads a file and then attempts to run it, or an application which looks like just an MP3 file) but none have yet contained a malicious payload, and Apple have taken steps to minimise the chances of them running anything without the user being completely aware of it.
The few risks
If a Mac user gets a PC-hosted virus by email, it won't affect the Mac. But if that email is forwarded to another PC user, the virus is still "live" and can infect the PC. So it is always a good idea to delete viruses which arrive in your inbox.
The exception is Microsoft Office macro viruses, some of which can affect documents on all platforms. If you open a Word document containing a virus, Word will warn you that the file contains macros and give you the option to disable them - always disable macros when you open a document unless you wrote the document yourself and you know why there are macros in it. If that's not an option - perhaps you frequently need to open arbitrary documents containing legitimate macros - then you may be one of the few Mac users who could usefully invest in virus prevention software.
