This Virus Business is catching

By Mark Tennent in Reader

Posted in utilities on July 31, 2008 at 10:04 am

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Running antivirus software on a Mac is like buying life insurance. You can can pay a fortune for something you’ll never actually benefit from personally. Luckily there are free antivirus solutions and recently a new one has appeared for Intel Macs.

In the 20 years we’ve been computing with Macs we have come across three viruses. One arrived on a floppy returned from a service bureau, another on a magazine cover CD and the third on a Zip cartridge returned from a printer. These were all in the days of System 6.5 to System 9 and did no damage to our systems. The reason we knew we had them was because some free software called Disinfectant told us and eradicated the infected files where it could. In OS X we use more free software called ClamXav, a reworking of a Unix virus detector which works fine if slowly. Its virus definitions are updated daily and it has an on-the-fly Sentry that scans files as they are received. So far it has detected umpteen mail attachments infected with Windows viruses.

Apple is so confident of OS X’s security they stopped giving away a free copy of Virex to mac.com subscribers and ship Macs with the firewall turned off. Our new Mac Pro had been running a month before we actually thought to check its firewall setting which was off but we hadn’t had any unwanted intruders in all that time.

New kid on the block
There are many expensive anti-virus options available for OS X and their publishers work hard at trying to convince us they are all part of safe computing. Now there is also a new kid on the block which, like ClamXav, comes with a zero price tag. Welcome to iAntiVirus the awkwardly named offering from PC Tools.

Their website lists 80 potential threats to Macs but on closer examination these are mainly proof of concepts, key loggers and Classic-only. Nevertheless, anything with the word free as a price tag is worth a look and iAntiVirus doesn’t disappoint. It is also available as a paid-for application for commercial sites which get telephone support and quicker downloads.

Installing is limited to all users for a Mac which prevents running iAntiVirus on a test user account or alternatively having a plain vanilla test user account for troubleshooting. It also runs as a GUI application which means it is always active in order to have virus detection turned on. There is a menu bar addition to turn iAntiVirus on and off as well as setting preferences. Other options include a variety of scans to strike a balance between time take to scan and its thoroughness and automatic update of virus definitions. The OnGuard feature can be activated when iAntiVirus is running, to give real-time virus checking for downloads.

For the time being iAntiVirus has taken the place of ClamXav on one of our Macs and so far it has caused no problems.

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