Anti-Virus and the Mac: Is It Necessary?

sadmac So you’ve just retired an aging PC and have decided to replace it with a shiny new Mac. Great! You probably already know that the Mac excels for photos, music and everything digital but when it comes to security one of the first question many users ask is “do I need to install an anti-virus program?” For an experienced PC user the answer may seem unsettling but the honest truth is no. However, before you brush aside any concerns for security it’s important to understand what constitutes a virus.

A virus is a program that’s able to copy itself across multiple computers and infect without the permission or knowledge of the owner. That is, it’s able to attack your computer and do the same to others without you giving it permission to do so. As of writing this, Mac OS X has been in existence for eight years and there is not a single virus that can infect the Mac. Mac OS X Leopard is more secure when it comes to viruses and this is because of the way it was designed.

When you want to make changes to your system you must enter your username and password. Because the Mac functions with multiple layers of accessibility, and users are only given access to the most basic layer, viruses must have authorization to the underlying core of the system to cause an infection. This requires someone with an authorized account to enter their username and password and is why even many safe applications ask for this information before they will install or perform certain tasks.

What doesn’t constitute a virus is a program that presents itself as performing something desirable and in reality is using your authorization to access your computer for other means. Essentially tricking you in to entering your password to harm your computer. This type of malicious program is called a Trojan Horse, or Trojan and one important thing to remember about how this differs from a virus is that it can’t spread by itself without the user giving permission to do so. This is a type of harmful application that is only protected against by the careful protection of your username and password, which is why you should never give this information unless it is being asked for by an application you trust and have received from a reliable source. The application making this request can always be verified by selecting the disclosure triangle next to the word “details” on the bottom left of the password authorization box.

For example, in this image we can see that the program “System Preferences” is asking for our username and password. Since “System Preferences” is an application that can be trusted it would be considered a secure application that we could safely give our username and password to.

Now it’s important to keep in mind that all systems, not just Macs are vulnerable to these types of attack and although anti-virus software can help find these applications there’s no software in the world that can prevent a user from being tricked into something through a lie. As for wether or not you should be concerned about these types of applications, currently there has been less than a handful of these applications that have ever existed for the Mac. So although the chances of these applications harming your computer are low and not something we should be afraid of, it is something that we should be aware of.

So, do you need to install an anti-virus application for your Mac? The answer is no, you don’t need to, if you maintain a strong password and are careful about which applications you give it out to than that should be all the “anti-virus” protection that you need. However there are still situations where you may want to as there are indeed anti-virus applications for the Mac, although most don’t serve the purpose you might imagine. The only real purpose they serve, as far as virus protection is concerned, is that they are able to scan for windows virus’ preventing your Mac from becoming a carrier of viruses to Windows computers when sharing over a network. If this is a concern for you, the free and open-source application clamXav is a great tool which is able to scan files for any potential Windows viruses.

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