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Member since November 3, 2006

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    Nick

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  1. Comment - Symantec Reports on Mac OS X Virus

    (Nov 3, 2006 - 4:41 PM)

    Hmmm ... I was never stupid enough to think that OS X was "immune from" malware. Heck, it would be possible to do enough damage without, say, a vulnerability that allows elevation of privileges: all someone would have to do is to induce the unwary to download something and run it.

    But it does *not* follow that because I know full well that there are theoretical possibilities, and real dangers, I should run out like a headless chicken and buy an AV scanner for my Mac. It's irrelevant to me what this spokesman's mythical being "the [sic] shopkeeper" thinks. In fact, my guess is that many shops would be only too keen to sell me a product I don't need, that wastes my CPU cycles, and that could itself cause me problems, as long as they got the sale.

    Joanna Rutskowsa, a world authority on the internals of both Windows and Linux, does not run an AV program even on Windows. Neither do many other experts in the field.

    http://www.eweek.com/art...2/0,1895,2040760,00.asp

    How much less does one need to do so on the Mac, which is not merely more secure by design but which has too small a market share to be of much interest to anyone wanting to write malware? The fact of the matter is, understanding and sensible caution are a better protection than an AV program. I do, in fact, run an AV program on my Windows box - I use NOD32, not trash from Symantec - but it's probably of less help than running as a limited user, switching services off you don't need, not running JavaScript willy-nilly, and all the rest of it. A program can't replace someone's intelligent understanding of what he's doing. And, in any case, AV programs (some reasonably good heuristic abilities in the better ones aside) are only as effective as their last set of definitions.

    And this guy wants me to buy a program for a platform that has just about no malware in the wild for it! And its not even as if this would be a cost-free option in stability - or even security - terms. (Some AV products only recently - coincidentally, they were from (guess who) Symantec - actually introduced vulnerabilities into the systems they were running on, owing to bugs in the code.)

    In short: no thank you, Frantzen. My wallet stays in my pocket.