Do any of you actually own Norton Anti Virus or similar? Sure OSX isn't invulnerable, but its pretty darn close and there aren't any viruses currently for macs. What do these apps actually do if they have nothing to fight? Is it actually just a scam to get scared people's money when they have no reason to be scared?
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No Need for Norton?
- Thread starter pickleman
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pickleman said:
More or less.
The main thing antivirus apps are good for now on Mac OS X is to catch Office macro viruses contained in Word or Excel documents received from Windows users.
Just because there are no Mac OS X viruses right now doesn't mean there never will be, so it is important to adopt good security habits now.
The problem with Norton Antivirus (and Virex) is that they are just terribly-written applications. Buggy, intrusive, CPU-hogging disasters. ClamXav isn't as full-featured as the commercial antivirus apps, but it's free and pretty lightweight. http://www.clamxav.com/
I have no experience with Intego VirusBarrier. Given their unethical marketing scare tactics, including their alarmist press release about a proof of concept trojan horse for Mac OS X, I am loathe to give them any business. Sophos looks pretty nice, but is only sold as part of a corporate package and not available to individuals.
That's about it...Silencio said:
Just keeps you from passing on infected files you get from PC users.
If you don't do a lot of file swapping with PC users there is no need to keep Norton running in the background. Just run it every now and then to do a sweep of the files on the drive.
Or you'll find Norton AV hogs CPU cycles.
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As far as the other half of the Norton crap, do not install the drive repair crap -- it isn't up-to-date due to Norton killing that product development. So it's more likely to ruin your drive than fix it.
pickleman said:
Mostly, yes. If antivirus software was worth a damn against viruses that didn't exist at the time the AV software was released, PC users would not have to update their virus definitions, follow me?
Mac antivirus software can, at best, protect PC users from receiving infected email from Mac users who are in the habit of forwarding email with file attachments. Mac users don't need protection themselves, and the PC viruses can't hijack the MacOS to make it send/forward viruses, so the worst that a Mac could do would be to forward an already-sent, already-infected email w/attachment on to a PC user, and it would have to be something that the Mac user either set up as a "rule" in their email program or else something that the Mac user actually sat down and did with manual button-clicks.
Oh, and NAV is rumored to add instability to the MacOS X environment, so this ridiculously low level of protection is provided at high expense.
Installing Disinfectant in your Classic System Folder would do you more good it's actually remotely possible that one of those 68K System-6/System-7 era viruses might actually execute and spread in the Classic environment (and do something horrid like put up a message that says "Don't Panic" or change your hard disk's name to "Trent Saburo"), which is a lot more than any PC virus will ever do on your system.
I think AntiVirus programs on the PC are more robust. I offload all my Virus checking needs to a Windows PC and keep my Mac running Anti-Virus free for performance reasons. Any files that I create on my Mac are clean of viruses. Any Office files that I receive from someone gets scanned on my PC first before I copy those files to my Mac. The viruses won't hurt my Mac but just in case I need to email those files to someone in the future directly from my Mac.
This has been proven incorrect too many times to count. The Mac is far and away the better platform for virus checking. The reason that the Mac is better is that it cannot be compromised by the viruses that it is trying to remove.BornAgainMac said: