Is It Time for Mac AV?

The din has increased of late over the “need” for AV on all Macs. Historically, there haven’t been a lot of overt malware threats to the platform, and thus it has persisted as a special case, for better or for worse. Commercial solutions have existed for years, and yet in the past few weeks some of those packages have been released for free (presumably because they’re not making much money anyway).

Some cite “Boonana” as the latest “big” threat since Koobface…

• New Mac Trojan uncovered: “Boonana”
• New Java trojan attacks Mac OS X via social networking sites

Of course, then the threat is downplayed…

• Intego classifies new Mac trojan threat as “minimal”

Nonetheless, it seems that there *is* Mac malware…

• Free anti-virus for Mac – 150,000 active users and plenty of malware found

Note that most of the stats in that report, however, seem to apply to either harmless files or cross-platform (Java) attacks

Nonetheless, there are several free AV and security tools out there that you might consider.

• http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/networking_security/index_top.html

Notable on the list are the free Sophos Mac AV, ProtectMac AV, ClamXav for Mac… you might also be interested in MacScan, which helps supplement AV in looking for other forms of cruftiness, and Little Snitch, which helps you monitor resources and connections that may or may not be good or approved.

Bottom line: Don’t panic, but start considering adding some security tools to your Macs. If you’re using Macs in the enterprise, then it’s probably a good time to start thinking about how to manage and scale security solutions (which you should be doing already, assuming you’ve not already gone down this path).