Osx & Virus Protection??? Options

[ourmanflinty]

Who has seen mbdf a / b ?? It's the only mac virus i've ever come across, it can affect OS 9 or below and has been around since the early days.It will live in a program and spread into other pieces of your mac every time it's used, such as control panels, system, progs.. You can find it in old compressed archived music s/w, certainly if you get one of the cd's full of pirate OS9 s/w that used to go around you should be careful. I have been caught, very rarely though, once when upgrading from a 9600 to a g4 and having to uncompress an archive to re-install some components..a couple of launches later and you will freeze and then hang at startup with a bus error, restart button. Boot from a cd and re-install system and replace anything infected. You generally do not need to check for virii ( ? ) because there as a rule there arent any, but then once in a while you will get caught ( 3 or 4 times in 12 yrs or more of mac audio support with mbdf ). I don't know if there will be more now we're unix based, probably?

[Synthetik]

That really is the question, Will there be more?
I guess if you were to profile a virus coder they would most likely be an 18 to 28 year old male with some UNIX experence. At least the ones I have heard of or seen. So with a UNIX base and a growning number of Mac users there soon could be more then the 1 virus that will hit more then 3 to 4 times in a 12 year period. I quess it's not in our best interest to ask a virus coder if they have made anything for a Mac yet.

[lepetitmartien]

mbdf is peanuts

If you're running pre OS X Mac OS and go though old files, get Disinfectant, it's free, and it just work for the OS viruses. It won't be of use for macro viruses though.

It's more than enough for common use.

On OS X we can't say "there will never be one", but it'll need at least some skills. I counsel people to read the guidelines for security published By The NSA, there's a lot of common sense hints and things. You can start for there, there's a lot of good things in it (that's the paranoid manual on OS X, you'll learn much from it).

don says mac, for ipfw, the Apple's interface is in the system preferences/Sharing/firewall. There's settings for common uses, only authorize the ones you need. And in the preferences/security check "deactivate the automatic session opening" and "password required to access the secured system preferences". it's just common sense

And DO NOT ACTIVATE YOUR ROOT ACCOUNT! (check the NSA document for full how-to/reversal). only if you know what you are doing should you activate it. but 99,99% of users just don't. In case, use SUDO instead in command line.

ishwan, I'll come back to address some of your questions, I just need to go to sleep… (5:40 m in Paris