WHat’s your favorite mac virus software?

[Michael Alberts]

Mac virus software? What’s that?

Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.

[Luke Maslen]

Hi John,

It’s very unlikely that a Mac virus is causing your problems. There are no Mac OS X viruses as such.

There are a couple of trojan horses which rely upon tricking the user in to opening them before they will carry out certain functions. For example someone might write an AppleScript to delete all files in a user’s Documents folder and then place a Microsoft Office icon on it. If you were tricked in to opening it, all your files might be deleted. Trojan horses cannot spread by themselves and are the kind of malware that one might expect from dodgy sites such as P2P networks for pirated music, videos and software. There are also macro viruses which affect Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, even on Mac OS X, but they currently have no impact on the rest of a Mac OS X system.

It is therefore a good idea to keep your video/audio editing system for that purpose and avoid using it for connecting to dubious services on the Internet or for word processing. A far more modest computer can be used for Internet and word processing activities, eg eMac or iBook.

If you do install antivirus software, be aware that any automated scanning of downloaded files is likely to interfere with video and audio work and this will cause dropped frames and other undesirable effects.

I’m quite a fan of the open source antivirus software known as ClamAV which is designed for UNIX systems including Mac OS X. A kind individual has provided a Mac OS X GUI for the software and you can download it from https://www.markallan.co.uk/clamXav/. This software does not scan for Mac OS Classic viruses and neither does it include automated scanning of downloaded files. It is useful if you wish to perform manual scanning or scheduled scanning. It is quite intuitive and includes regular updates which can be retrieve manually or automatically. It can be slow to scan large files and hopefully that is something which might improve in future versions.

In regards to commercial antivirus software, Sophos is very safe to use and it is easy to enable and disable its automated scanning. Unfortunately it is only available for multiple users and you can’t just buy a single copy.

If you have a .Mac account with Apple, then you can take advantage of Virex 7.5.1 which is included with your subscription.

Various antivirus programs have had problems with whole mailboxes being deleted if a virus was found in the mailbox. So check the preferences carefully to make sure that mailboxes are not automatically deleted if a virus is detected.

Finally, when experiencing random problems in Mac OS X, it’s always a good idea to use Disk Utility to repair permissions on your startup disk and Alsoft DiskWarrior 3.0.2 is an excellent commercial utility for repairing directory structure corruption in Panther and older Mac systems.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design