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General discussion

Antivirus and firewall for Mac OSX

Oct 31, 2006 6:02AM PST

Hi there,

I m buying my first mac soon and would like to know more about security. I know the macs are a lot more secure than Windows but I have noticed that there are a/v and firewall software available for the mac as well. My questions are:

1. What are the best a/v and firewall software for the mac. Are there any tests done by an independent website regarding their effectiveness tested?
2. Are there good free a/v and firewall software like there are for Windows.

Thank you

Discussion is locked

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AV and Firewall
Oct 31, 2006 7:03AM PST

Yes, there are AV products out there for the Mac, some even claim to find viruses on OS X.
Currently there are no viruses for OS X. None.

1. No independent tests on the effectiveness of AV products for Mac, that I have seen. It's probably difficult to do as there are currently no Viruses to detect.
2. OS X has a built in firewall and ClamavX is a free AV program for the Mac. It finds Windows viruses so that you do not pass them on to those using a lesser OS.

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and if you run Windows on that Apple Mac hardware,
Oct 31, 2006 7:33AM PST

all bets are off - running Windows means you need ALL the Windows protection you can get your hands on...

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Sooo
Nov 4, 2006 8:53PM PST

Does installing windows mean that your Mac OS X is also made insecure or compromised?
And another important thing. Lets say that I am using Windows on a Mac and a I get a boot time virus so to avoid that can I press the shift button and instead boot into Mac safely and remove the virus from Mac? I have heard that calmxav or something detects Win viruses as well so I can install that and safely remove the virus?
What if I get a a virus while using parallels?

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BootCamp and Parallels
Nov 4, 2006 9:54PM PST

Installing Windows on your Mac does not make the OS X side of your machine insecure or compromised. Unless of course you consider running windows to be a compromise in itself.
Using BootCamp, once you have booted into Windows your machine can really no longer be considered a Mac. It is now a box running Windows and will become infected like any other box. The OS X side is not affected.
I don't think that booting into OS X will not allow you to remove any viruses that are resident on the Windows partition because of the way that the Windows partition is created.
Using Parallels, the same risk of infection for the Windows side exists and although you can drag and drop from one to the other, I don't know that you can use clamxav, a Mac product, to deal with viruses on the Windows side. ClamxAV does have a Windows version though.
Before you even consider running Windows on your Mac, using any of the current methods, you are seriously advised to make sure that you have sufficient AV, ASpam, AMalware and all the other goodies that Windows users need. You will NOT be protected by OS X.

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Yea but i thought clam also helps win
Nov 5, 2006 12:51AM PST

I heard that clamxav also disinfects windows viruses from the same program. I heard ok i might be mistaken. And I also heard that you CAN look at the windows parrt from mac and the mac part from win.
Well but who would need win once u have mac.

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ClamxAV for Mac
Nov 5, 2006 4:55AM PST

will find windows viruses when they are sent as attachments in email or if they are contained in a downloaded file. ClamxAV only looks at OS X. It does nothing for the windows side.
Windows is only running when you boot into it. At that point nothing is running on the OS X side, which means that ClamxAV is not loaded and not running.

As I mentioned, there is a Clam version for Windows too.

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Forgot to mention
Nov 5, 2006 4:58AM PST

The Windows partition of the Mac HD would probably be formatted as NTFS.
OS X can read NTFS but it cannot write to it. Hence, you would not be able to fix anything in the Windows partition if you were booted in OS X.
XP is unable to read or write to, the HFS+ (Journaled) formatted drive.

Parallels works differently in that it reads from an image file and the physical HD is not partitioned.

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