Solved Taking ALL opinions on this…

ijack December 5, 2013 at 00:32:02

Macs are not immune from malware.

trvlr December 5, 2013 at 05:51:41

✔ Best Answer

Sadly even Macs are now vulnerable to pests… (and probably have always been - even if only low-level/minor). But until fairly recently there wasn't much in the way of attacks that made headlines. Sophos (and I think a couple of others too) now offer a freebie anti-virus util for Macs… I have Macs systems as well as Windows. I run Sophos freebie on my Macs - and although it did find four pests initially - two were minor and no real threat; two were a little more serious (phishing items and a key-logger) - all were easily removed by Sophos. It offers options various in terms of network drives too; and can be auto-updated or done so manually - which I advise to do regularly. It also runs in the background… I installed it also on my Windows systems and it found the same phishing items which M$ Security Essential appeared to miss? Again they were removed OK… I kep M$ util updated and active, and also run a Sophos scan regularly too… Oddly there seem to be no conflicts between the two utils - whereas in the past it was generally advised not to have two such utils running at the same time; either they wouldn't work properly (if at all) or would report false positives. Sophos did catch/flag warnings re' a couple of items recently - advised that a site to which I had gone for a download util had something dodgy there along with the download..; so I declined that download and went elsewhere... So… my advice is to run "something" on a Mac system too these days; as there are those out there starting to go after the Mac OS - for whatever reason(s). Incidentally a programme item (IT security advisor) on Beeb Radio recently advised that even to click on - but not actually go to an active link in - an email purporting to be from a bank, paypal etc.. would more than likely now drop/download a trojan. Which trojan would immediately activate, hide it self and remove traces of its presence fully (unless you really know how to find it); and then start to log and extract login/password details etc. when they were used… Advice was (is) not to even click on (or open into the body of) the email - let alone go to the link enclosed - as even the simple click on etc. will now activate the pests. Things are getting nastier out there daily... message edited by trvlr