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Apple Quietly Recommends Antivirus Software For Macs
Barence writes "After years of boasting about the Mac's near invincibility, Apple is now advising its customers to install security software on their computers. Apple — which has continually played on Windows' vulnerability to viruses in its advertising campaigns — issued the advice in a low-key message on its support forums. 'Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.' It goes on to recommend a handful of products." Reader wild_berry points out the BBC's story on the unexpected recommendation.
Apple is known to be very susceptible to a number of bugs and viruses. So a recommendation to use antiviral products is quite sensible and it makes sense.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I am increasingly annoyed by Apple's following Microsoft in "Security Theatre" techniques like the Leopard "OMG you downloaded that file from TEH INTERWEBS!" dialogs, but this is going too far.
Antivirus software does not make any difference to the virus writing process. It can only detect and block existing exploits. Until there ARE active exploits in the wild all it can do is cause time and data loss through false positives.