Funny Applecare Story

[richard4339]

So, I've had my MacBook Pro now since October, and its been doing some interesting things; namely, it has a backlight flicker, and random icons disappear from the dock and other areas.

I called Applecare yesterday and asked them. They thought the backlight was a memory issue and walked me through resetting the PRAM (didn't fix it, so the Knoxville Apple Store will be seeing me soon), but even better, the rep actually told me to install Norton Antivirus. He said that while there are no known viruses, there is spyware that has made it through.

 

[phungy]

Oh rly?

 

[richard4339]

Yep, I was actually told to install Norton because Macs had spyware.

 

[isleofjib]

anyone have more info on this? is it true? what is the threat?

 

[richard4339]

My guess is that it is not entirely true. There are things that can happen to Macs, but who knows.

 

[isleofjib]

i would agree, but why would applecare tell you that? i'm sure that if there was anything "in the wild", something would have been said about it. but still, makes me nervous. if there are now these kind of threats on macs, it would really suck.

 

[compuwar]

He said that while there are no known viruses, there is spyware that has made it through.

Ok, what's funny about it? While I certainly wouldn't be advocating massive installs of anti-malware at this point, there are Trojans and spyware for the Mac and OSX.

 

[isleofjib]

how do you get rid of any spyware you might get on a mac? i've never seen any anti-malware programs out there. (not counting anti-virus). how would you know if you have it?

 

[richard4339]

"Funny Applecare Story" was probably a bad title, I was simply amused by that suggestion.

More than likely, at some point soon, I'm going to back up my documents and just reformat the thing. I'd like to install Boot Camp anyway, and my drive isn't partionable ATM.

 

[e12a]

ugh norton...

 

[Sun Baked]

ugh norton...

Probably just wanted to sell some 3rd Party Support later, after the Norton Virus creates its performance and stability problems.

 

[compuwar]

i would agree, but why would applecare tell you that? i'm sure that if there was anything "in the wild", something would have been said about it. but still, makes me nervous. if there are now these kind of threats on macs, it would really suck.

There *are* in the wild Trojans and keyloggers, there *are not* in the wild viruses or worms. Pretty much all the installs to date haven't taken advantage of any of the patched overflows, but social engineering to get a user with admin rights to install them. I'd expect some of the older worms (such as lion) to be easily portable, but fortunately other than the WiFi thing and a kernel update that took way too long Apple has been relatively good at fixing overflows. However, if QuickTime keeps up its security update record this year, I'm uninstalling it!

 

[AlexGFX88]

"Funny Applecare Story" was probably a bad title, I was simply amused by that suggestion.

More than likely, at some point soon, I'm going to back up my documents and just reformat the thing. I'd like to install Boot Camp anyway, and my drive isn't partionable ATM.

Hey! I bought my MacBook Pro from knoxville too :-D

Theres a hot chick there that works the counter, tell her I said hi

-Alex

 

[holamiamigos]

Hey! I bought my MacBook Pro from knoxville too :-D

Theres a hot chick there that works the counter, tell her I said hi

-Alex

yup me too