[MACEP] antivirus: Sophos or Norton?

[Eric Harrison]

On Tue, 24 May 2005 radams at lane.k12.or.us wrote:

> There WAS a virus for OS-9 in 1996 and so far OS-X hasn't had any that have
> worked, unless you activated root mode, which is even below administrator mode
> and has to be set up specially, instead of being the default mode as on
> Windows.  One hacker said that on a scale of 1-10, writing a Mac virus was a
> 9.5 and not worth it.

That "One hacker" is not the one you need to worry about ;-)

> We last had a Mac virus in 1989 (except for one which came on the Norton's
> AntiVirus disk we tried once).  Still, we don't enable Macros for Microsoft
> Office products and that seems to be the only source of trouble.
>
> Antivirus still won't stop phishing.

The overall concept here is that "security is only as strong as the
weakest link". In some cases your software is the weakest link[1],
other times it is the wetware.

-Eric

[1] If you don't think OSX can be the weakest link, ask yourself why
     Apple puts out all those patches[2].

[2] At least said patches tend to fix bad code rather than bad design[3]

[3] See win9x