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Report That OS X Snow Leopard May Include Antivirus
File this firmly in the "rumor" category for now. the JoshMeister writes (in the third person) "Mac antivirus company Intego broke the story this morning that Apple is apparently including antivirus functionality in its upcoming operating system, Snow Leopard. But which antivirus engine is Apple using? Security researcher Joshua Long discusses the likely candidates."
bah, what respectful virus author targets anything but the Microsoft OS ?
Can we get a weather report from Hell ?
Its not the years, its the mileage
At its core a virus scanner is just a wrapper around a multipattern byte matcher, so maybe it's better to ask whether they're using Aho-Corasick or Wu-Manber...
Personally I use ClamXAV and always have. Mainly because I have a tripple boot system (not that I use much more than OS X, but every once in a while I need to use Windows or Linux for testing something). Because of the fact that there are other operating systems on my box, I wanted an anti-virus in case somehow it could affect the other instances on the system.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Virus protection? If Mac vs PC guy has taught me anything, it's that MAC'S DON'T GET VIRUSES! Don't lie to me...
The Linux foundation regrets distributing Mcaffee which is a rootkit whose name looks a lot like McAfee.
I don't think that would help, mad-clickers implicitly trust everything.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Let them run McAfee. Those Macs run too fast as it is, and that should make those shooter games playable by us mere humans.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
It's time we came clean. Macs do get viruses. Actually they get a lot of viruses. Really the OS is basically viruses and itunes. We pretend like we can work on these systems but it's just a screen full of viruses all having sex with eachother. The reason you never heard about it because back in ought 3' we took an oath to never reveal that terrible terrible truth. We relied on Windows users hatred of Macs preventing them from finding out. But, now that it's out in the open I suppose we ought to move forward and try to rebuild, maybe accept the situation and try to secure our OS.
So uhh.. Windows users... How do you make a *shudder* bug fix?
And that was the last Terry Fox run I ever participated in.
Apple has been light on details they have made public about Snow Leopard. We know they implemented a CDSA security architecture, expanded use of the sandboxing, and now there is this report of actual malware scanning, but the info on Apple.com is basically nonexistent. I surmise this is intentional. Security people either have developer accounts or will read up on this stuff in technical papers when NDA's expire next week. For regular users, Apple doesn't even want to bring up security as an issue. They will make blanket marketing statements about it, but they would rather leave all the details to more technical venues. This was their policy for Leopard too, with most users having no clue that a full port of TrustedBSD's mandatory access controls was included and being used to sandbox certain potentially vulnerable services.
There was a guy who was studying technical writing at my university. He uninstalled his anti-virus software because it was preventing him from installing some free software he wanted.
Immune? No. Reasonably secure by design, yes.
Dunno. While no platform is 100% secure, design does count for a lot. There are a lot of "proof of concept" hacks out there for the Mac, but very, very, very few "in the wild" 'sploits floating around, especially self-replicating ones like viruses and worms. The installed base of Internet-going Macs is a few dozen million at the least, and mostly personal computers with personal info and used to buy stuff online - prime targets for the big-shop black hats. I doubt very much it's not worth their while... I just think they can't go after a system with even a moderate level of security.
I don't think this says something about Apple (see the part above about "proof of concept" hacks), I think this says a ton about Microsoft.
I really don't buy "ecosystem" arguments - why is IIS and MSSQL pwnd on a regular basis by automated attacks, but Apache and MySQL only once in a blue moon (and Oracle almost never)?
Problem with having a single, unified anti-virus (if ever such a thing is reliably possible), programmers will have an easier time guessing what protections they'll face when creating a virus.
I agree, to some extent. In terms of attacks on the antivirus system itself a single system may be more vulnerable. In terms of bypassing signatures, however, there is no reason centralized anti-malware cannot draw signatures from disparate feeds, the user subscribes to, be they supplied by Apple, open projects, or commercial companies, for free, or charge.
That said, Apple including malware detection doesn't mean users can't install other malware detection services as well. ClamAV isn't going away just because Apple ships a built in competitor.
End users aren't encouraged to practice personal responsibility, they pay and trust... pay for trust...
From Apple's Snow Leopard Web site:
Security Advice The Mac is designed with built-in technologies that provide protection against malicious software and security threats right out of the box. However, since no system can be 100 percent immune from every threat, antivirus software may offer additional protection. Here are some other ways to help keep your information as safe as possible:
That sounds to me like end users are being encouraged to practice personal responsibility.
...and no such thing exists there, this would seem to be completely made up bullshit.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
So, we have a Slashdot story speculating about the outcome of a story on another site which uses unknown, and not necessarily reliable source, about a possible feature in an unreleased OS.
Can we please wait until there is real evidence before shouting that the sky's falling please.
Oh, sorry, this is Slashdot! ;-)
As for the article: *IF* it is true, fine! Who cares what anti-virus engine it uses as long as it works and is ready for any dangerous malware which does come along for MacOS?
(And for those who wish to gloat, no OS is fully immune, especially from the security hole at the keyboard. Why does Linux need an anti-virus product like ClamAV?! Linux doesn't have any viruses.... ;-))
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
Although some Snow Leopard details may not be available yet, most components of the Mac OS X security architecture pre-date Snow Leopard, and details are available, in places like this... Mac OS X Security Architecture
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
So when will they actually implement something genuinely useful against real security threats, like package management?
If you don't think Apple has been adding useful technologies to stop security threats, you haven't been paying attention. Of course most people don't they just assume because Apple doesn't advertise their security technologies to the mainstream public, such technologies they don't exist. You remember that vulnerability in Apple's ZerConf implementation (one of the few enabled by default services on OS X)? No? That's because Apple had sandboxed the entire service in Leopard making the vulnerability impossible to exploit without another exploit for the sandbox, which never materialized. Maybe you remember that said vulnerability did exist on several Linux distros and was exploitable?