For the Mac users on my list...

[seawasp]

Given that Macs have increased drastically in popularity, I have to presume they have also increased drastically in vulnerability. What's a good antivirus/antispyware/etc. package for my Macs?

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

The good news is, they haven't (so far) increased in vulnerability. There are one or two trojans out there disguised as warez copies of legit apps, but as long as you don't download illegal copies of commercial apps you are probably safe. The key, however, is to run OSX 10.7 ("Lion") and use sandboxed apps -- sandboxing being a prerequisite for getting your app into the Mac App Store (this is a hint). Sandboxing basically makes the apps run under a raft of whips and bondage security constraints that tend to keep malware at bay. Oh, and keep the personal firewall switched on. And don't use Acrobat for reading PDFs, it's a festering security nightmare. (The free Preview.app that comes with OSX is in any event nearly as powerful as Acrobat Reader and a lot nicer to use.)

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

What [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] said. The son is also going through a computer science program as well as criminal justice (goal: forensic computer work) and maintains Avast on my computer as an antivirus, plus maintains an aggressive firewall.

I've found Preview to be much nicer than Acrobat on my Dell at work, even in looking at the same PDFs. Problems arise sometimes with specialized education software (eSIS, grrrr) that aren't designed to play well with either Firefox or Safari, but those are rarities outside of the very specialized software I have to use at work.

[argonel.livejournal.com]

I unfortunately don't have direct experience. However the underlying security model for OSX is pretty robust. You can probably remain fairly comfortable as long as you have good backups.

Your biggest threats are hard drive failure and trojans. Both of which will wipe out your data.

[kengr]

I don't have any mac stuff more recent than an SE30. But I think my favorite PC antivirus is available for OS X. Check f-prot.com to see for sure. I *know* there's a Linux version.

[eacole72.livejournal.com]

I use Sophos, which is what my husband's employer has a site license for and offers to all employees for their home computers. It works pretty well and has caught a couple things before they got entrenched.

While Apple is gaining, it still is an also-ran and not as worth it for the script kiddies. It's a nice side benefit, at least.

[kharaku.livejournal.com]

To my knowledge there are still no in the wild viruses for Mac. quicktime and anything from the net is still a concern but you'd have to be considerd lucky to be hit by an actual virus on the mac

NOTE if you want to moonlight with windows use virtualization (like paralells or virtual box... or vmware if you feel like being all kruto

either way bootcamp; douches your real hard disk, Wine touches your real hard disk, watch out with anything you invite on your mac that can use non mac code and have direct access to your disk!

[alex swavely (from livejournal.com)]

Windows is vulnerable because it was based on a single-user operating system. That is, the end user could modify everything on the system without constraint.

OS/X and Linux are based on SysV Unix, which was designed from the outset for multi-user use - with safeguards in place to prevent users from interfering with the system itself without explicit permission to do so. Sure, there are still vulnerabilities, but Windows is still the shortest path to ground.