Thread

This one’s interesting. I haven’t got a Mac, but it looks like the script kiddies are getting bored with Windows?

BBC story - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7760344.stm
Apple support item - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2550

The media is trying to make a story out of a non-story.  If Apple wanted to promote the use of anti-virus, or thought there were serious threats and reasons to run it, would they bury it in a KB article?  And wouldn’t there be some AV software out of the box, or mentioned more prominently elsewhere?  This is simply legal posturing, to help prevent possible future litigation.  Apple is burdened by some of the most nonsensical lawsuits of all nonsensical corporate lawsuits, and anything to keep court costs down is going to be considered, including posting (really, revising) an article to their seldom used KB.

That people are ready to leap on this with conjecture about what that means for the state of malware on the platform just means it’s a slow news day.  Most of the sourced material, btw, isn’t coming from Apple, but from AV vendors, and what do you think they’re going to say?  Don’t buy our software?

Edit: no offense intended to you or any Windows users, bluedreamer, these articles just got under my skin this morning and I should have blogged about it on my site to get it out of my system.  Apple’s not perfect, OS X is not invulnerable, but there is reality, and there is newstainment/sensationalism, and this falls clearly in the latter category.

This sort of thing makes you pull your hair out then! Love the “conspiracy” bit about the AV vendors though 😊

Well, they (the AV vendors) have for years, dating back to OS 8 / 9 days insisted that their products were necessary for any Mac user who was serious about protecting their data.  It’s just business, not unlike how drug companies market their products.  Not a conspiracy or anything, but if you look at the news reports that actually reveal the sources, you’ll see them quoting PR folks at the AV vendors.  Other news outlets then quote the quote, dropping or obscuring the source, etc.

Though there was that one time that an AV company created a virus and then proceeded to issue a press release that this virus’s existence was proof that you needed to buy their product.  So maybe the conspiracy bit isn’t so far fetched…

This sort of thing makes you pull your hair out then!

I go just as batty at this sort of thing when it’s not Apple related, if that provides any consolation.  Or maybe it doesn’t. 😉

AV companies are in business as you say, so touting their wares at all OS’s is part of the natural course of things I suppose!

Just as an aside, do Mac users generally use any security related software at all, ie a firewall? I’m curious!

OS X has a built in firewall that most (hopefully) keep enabled, or are using an Airport Extreme Base Station which has its own firewall capabilities.  But in general, security is handled at the OS level, primarily with having to authenticate with an administrative level account for certain actions, even if you are running as a logged in administrator.  That’s why the successful malware on OS X has been limited to what you can accomplish via social engineering.  I could write an application that would delete all your files, and if I could get you to download it, run it, and authenticate, well, then there’s little any OS or software can do.  But you’re not likely to find many Mac users running anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-adware, etc. software.

Couple years old, but some discussion of this in this thread if you’re interested, particularly with the thought of Mac users running anti-virus software not for their own benefit, but to help be good neighbors with Windows users when sharing files.

I was wrong, wasn’t for legal reasons, was simply a routine update to an outdated KB article, so Apple’s just removed it:

“We have removed the KnowledgeBase article because it was old and inaccurate,” Apple spokesman Bill Evans, told Macworld. “The Mac is designed with built-in technologies that provide protection against malicious software and security threats right out of the box.”