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Thanks for any help. I think you must have misheard them. THere is no anti-virus for mac. Norton, Intego and Sophos all sell anti-virus software for Macs. As to what benefits they all actually provide, that's another matter. I used Virex 7 for some time on OS X. It is incapable of spotting all the `classic MacOS' viruses as far as I can tell (Virex 6 does that). I get lots of spam.  I ran Virex 7 on suspected spam attachments - well, I ran it on files I was pretty damned certain were malware. It was usually a month or two after a new type of malware started turning up that the latest Virex update caught up and was capable of identifying them as malware - /usually/ there was a month or two when Virex was unable to spot the actual malware that was actually turning up. So I would suggest that Virex at least is utterly useless in its intended role - but it never did any harm here.  Norton products are famous for fucking up Macs (and have done harm here) - avoid like the plague. You might find this interesting: <http://vmyths.com/column/1/2004/5/2/ <http://vmyths.com/column/1/2003/6/11/ Rowland.

So I would suggest that Virex at least is utterly useless in its intended role - but it never did any harm here.  Norton products are famous for fucking up Macs (and have done harm here) - avoid like the plague. Looks like the Norton people learned their lesson with vers. 11. I had no problems so far and their updates come quite often, actually. (My Mac was plagued too - it took me days to find a workaround ...)

Ebony, there are many anti-virus products for the Mac.  Whether any of them are (a) necessary or (b) of any practical benefit is a different matter There is nothing necessary on the Mac side actually, because there is no Mac-specific Virus around. If you can live with all those PC virus and trojan files that come with (spam)mail, you don´t need any protection. This may be different, if you use Microsoft Office for the Mac or if you are in a Windows network. I have good experiences with Intego AntiVirus and Norton Antivirus 11. I have mixed experiences with Sophos: It worked fine for weeks, but came up with some virus warnings, that were not real. Norton and Sophos have several updates per month, Intego usually just one. If there were not those bad misbehaviours of older Norton Software - I would highly recommend version 11. Why hasn't anyone in the thread mentioned the obvious: ClamXav ? It's free - it's built on the standard AV engine on *nix mail servers, and the virus definitions are updated several times per day.

Ebony < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it said: Nige Danton < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it said: I've received a proposal for the installation of a small network in my office. It's 2 x macs and a dell server. They have recommended 3 x Norton Anti Virus for Macintosh - is anti virus software necessary for the macs? As I understand it, all current `malware in the wild' that can affect MacOS X has to be installed by an admin user.  So accidental infection shouldn't be very likely. Note that most Mac users do run in administrator accounts full-time, since this is the default configuration of Mac OS X after installation. There are no Mac OS X viruses in the wild. Most malware in the wild that can affect Mac OS X are in the form of:      a. trojans (rare)      b. exploits against apache/smb/other services (more prevalent) Successful service exploits (b, above) are able to gain root access on Mac OS X *without* an administrator password, and *without* the user running in an administrator account.

Why hasn't anyone in the thread mentioned the obvious: ClamXav ? It's free - it's built on the standard AV engine on *nix mail servers, and the virus definitions are updated several times per day. It's also incredibly slow. It is, by a long, long, LONG way the slowest anti-virus system I have ever seen in action. Zone Alarm on my Vista box will complete scanning roughly 250 GB of data (total, across all partitions and disks) in four partitions on a 250 GB drive and one partition on a 80 GB drive on a system _base_d on a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4, 2.25 GB RAM, in the same time that ClamXav will take to scan about one quarter of the way through roughly 170 GB of data on a 250 GB, single-partition, drive on a 2.1 GHz iMac G5 with 2.5 GB RAM, and doesn't do much better on Intel Macs which have _two_ processors of at least 2 GHz... ClamXav's lack of speed is one reason why I simply don't bother with anti-virus on a Mac. I'm not spending money to defeat a nonexistent threat, and the free anti-virus stinks. Until there's an actual, live, malware threat for Macs, I'll pass, thanks.

Most malware in the wild that can affect Mac OS X are in the form of:      a. trojans (rare)      b. exploits against apache/smb/other services (more prevalent) Successful service exploits (b, above) are able to gain root access on Mac OS X *without* an administrator password, and *without* the user running in an administrator account. Really?  Got any _link_s to a de_script_ion of any? The only malware I've heard of afflicted MacOS X is trojans - which are as you say rare.  If the other sort of attack is more prevalent - well, I've heard nothing about it.  Do tell. Rowland.