Should Apple Macs have antivirus?

needforspeed · 24 Nov 2011 at 21:52

Hi, my friend has an Apple Mac and they wanted to borrow my USB flash drive. They gave it back to me and I plugged it into my computer that has Windows 7. The antivirus on my computer detected a few viruses. Is it best to install antivirus on my friend's Mac OS?

pingwing · 24 Nov 2011 at 22:00

Depends what type of virus they were as they might not do anything to the mac... (and I dont know whats best if you want to check)

needforspeed · 24 Nov 2011 at 22:07

I don't have a record of the viruses now.

Jimbeam3678 · 24 Nov 2011 at 22:42

If you have common sense no need for anti virus on a mac.

theheyes · 24 Nov 2011 at 23:53

You need to take an occams razor approach to this one - it sounds to me like it was plugged into an infected PC at some point. I'm not saying its impossible but it's unlikely the Mac is infecting USB sticks so I would rule out other possibilities first.

memyselfandi · 25 Nov 2011 at 05:50

If you search this forum you'll find that this is a contentious subject.

There are two camps;

- the first say the you do not need it, any Mac viruses/malware there have been have required you to be dumb or using dodgy software or both to get, if a virus does appear and screws their system they will just re-install/recover

- the second camp say ... well whilst there isn't many wild viruses/malware tageting OSX as there are products like the free antivirus product from Sophos which have minimal overhead on the system you might as well put it on just in case it catches something (on top of the normal precautions which the first group takes anyway). After all Apple does include some anti-malware protection in the OS anyway.

You pays your money, (well not actually in either case), and makes your choice.

Personally I belong to the second camp, on my general use machines at least ...

The viruses you found, assuming that they are Windows ones anyway, wouldn't have been affecting the Mac in any way as they were probably written for Windows. Whether the antivirus products for the Mac scan files for Windows viruses I couldn't say ... but if you are receiving files from a third party then, how ever good your local practices are, you don't know how good their practices are, (you may be careful on what you run ... they may download dodgy software, automatically run anything emailed to them, etc), so it makes sense to scan the incoming files ... which your Windwos 7 box did and picked up the viruses.

At the end of the day it's up to your friend whether they run antivirus on their Mac or not ... just let them know that the files they have are infected so that they can take steps before they share them again.

feriso · 25 Nov 2011 at 09:34

I'm from the first camp; its most likely that the files themselves were infected before they made it onto the mac and as such they have no effect.

Really, nothing to worry about at all; I'd quite happily stick a usb disk laden with viri into my mac as then watch it as it does............ absolutely nothing!

fez · 25 Nov 2011 at 10:58

If you are installing a lot of untrustworthy software then maybe but you have to be complicit in allowing a virus to infect your mac. Unless you give it access to your system, it can't do much.

moogle · 25 Nov 2011 at 11:03

divaboy said:
If you have common sense no need for anti virus on a mac.

Same thing could be said about Windows. Although you need much more sense and knowledge so a mac wins on that point.

The only way a virus can come from a Mac to Windows is through some file format, don't see how it'd come in as an executable.

Vonhelmet · 25 Nov 2011 at 11:19

moogle said:
Same thing could be said about Windows. Although you need much more sense and knowledge so a mac wins on that point.

The only way a virus can come from a Mac to Windows is through some file format, don't see how it'd come in as an executable.

Windows has been a victim of drive by viruses and worms for a long time now. At best, to date, viruses on OS X have required the user to give a password to install them, so the best they can hope for is to trojan something in.

Hopefully Windows is better on that front nowadays, but I wouldn't know, as I've not used it outside work for literally years.

moogle · 25 Nov 2011 at 11:24

Vonhelmet said:
Windows has been a victim of drive by viruses and worms for a long time now. At best, to date, viruses on OS X have required the user to give a password to install them, so the best they can hope for is to trojan something in.

Hopefully Windows is better on that front nowadays, but I wouldn't know, as I've not used it outside work for literally years.

Yeah I agree the versions before Vista had weak security. I survived them though

Just have to know what software is decent and what is dodgy. However not everyone is like that (which is why those ads which look like the OS GUI still fools people).

Windows 7/Vista has UAC which is what you describe, the program doesn't have administrative privileges until a user enters the password.

However most users find it annoying and turn it off so it's effectively useless.
Can't protect a PC against a careless user

Vonhelmet · 25 Nov 2011 at 12:39

moogle said:
Yeah I agree the versions before Vista had weak security. I survived them though

Just have to know what software is decent and what is dodgy. However not everyone is like that (which is why those ads which look like the OS GUI still fools people).

Windows 7/Vista has UAC which is what you describe, the program doesn't have administrative privileges until a user enters the password.

However most users find it annoying and turn it off so it's effectively useless.
Can't protect a PC against a careless user

The thing is, in the old days all the common sense in the world still wasn't enough with Windows, because you could get hacked just via open ports in the OS, or email worms, or compromised images on websites.

moogle · 25 Nov 2011 at 14:59

Vonhelmet said:
The thing is, in the old days all the common sense in the world still wasn't enough with Windows, because you could get hacked just via open ports in the OS, or email worms, or compromised images on websites.

Yeah it was pretty bad (Windows ME) and I had to reinstall quite a lot back then. But it has got better and plus I'm too used to Windows now

sbi5ar · 28 Nov 2011 at 19:00

One thing that has always confused me...

If running parallels in the hybrid mode. Do you need antivirus? and would you need antivirus that covers both the Windows section and the OSX section?

Vonhelmet · 29 Nov 2011 at 17:43

sbi5ar said:
One thing that has always confused me...

If running parallels in the hybrid mode. Do you need antivirus? and would you need antivirus that covers both the Windows section and the OSX section?

It would be incredibly unlikely that anything could sneak across the virtual machine barrier, given that it would need to know that there was such a barrier in place, which is probably borderline impossible.