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Apple Says Macs Are Safe, No Antivirus Needed
lobridge writes "Over the last two days multiple news feeds (and Slashdot) have been reporting that Apple has been quietly recommending antivirus software for their machines. It appears now that Apple has deleted an entry on their forums that suggested this and are saying that Mac computers are 'safe out of the box.'"
Even after the user starts clicking on things, Macs are generally safe. The user must explicitly punch holes in their system to create most vulnerabilities.
Honestly, the original tech note struck me as an attempt by Apple to say something that Apple politically couldn't say: Mac antivirus software primarily protects against Windows viruses. If Windows exists on your network or runs on your Mac via virtualization, your windows systems will be safer if you run Mac antiviral software. (Macs can't get infected, but they can be carriers!) Thus running antiviral software is a "good idea" and presents "one more program" that must be defeated.
Of course, once the press got wind of this poorly worded tech note, it made more sense for Apple to simply pull it rather than take the political hit of wording it correctly.
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The strength of Mac against viruses lays solely in the use of very stable FOSS solutions for the basics (very close to stable Debian versions) and then building on top of that (Aqua, CoreAudio, CoreImage etc. don't have any links to sockets). Really, what services CAN lay bare on a Mac to the internet: SSH (OpenSSH), E-mail (Postfix), Webserver (Apache). On the program side, you have Safari (Webkit) or Mozilla with Flash (Adobe) or Java (Sun) and those don't come above user level without requiring extreme interaction from the user (passwords). There is no such thing as ~/Library/StartupItems or ~/Library/LaunchDaemons and you need to become root to put stuff in /Library.
Of course as soon as a vulnerability is reported the community fixes it which trickles down to other vendors like Apple, RedHat etc. and many of those vulnerabilities for Apache or Postfix are hardly exploitable or only for rare setups (usually buffer overflows which could lead to an exploit if somebody was savvy enough to analyze all of them and see where they have space enough to load their own stuff and then call it too).
To have a successful attack on a Mac would also mean that you can successfully attack Linux or other Unixes or it would require a serious bug in certain programs (like Safari or Mail) which also allows to unnoticeable have a huge payload to replace things like Safari with a 'hacked' version or implement a plugin that does something weird.
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Correction: You use Windows because it's what most programs *you know* run on. I've converted from Windows a long time ago and I can do everything I did on my old machine on the Mac. Ripping CDs? No problem, UI is better too. Web design? Photo manipulation? Video editing? Yes, yes, and yes. Coding, watching movies, playing music... need I go on?