Well - after the recent posting by Apple of an article on antivirus protection for Mac OS X and then withdrawing it. It got me thinking.

I am not so naive to not expect problems, attacks etc. despite some of Apple’s advertising. The question came about protection. I had run Virex a few years ago - it was buggy, cpu-intensive and frankly not that good. I switched to ClamXav - it was free and was regularly updated. I was happy for a while, until it started to clash with some things and cause problems. Though I don’t expect that it was the only culprit.

So I ran without anything for a while. Then I re-installed ClamXav - a later version. It was fine. It was just difficult to handle real-time scanning - it was more suited to scheduled scanning.

But when I recently purchased a software bundle - along came Inetgo Virus Barrier. So that has gone on. It’s done a full scan and found nothing. That’s good.

But the nature of attacks has changed. My use of OmniWeb and Camino as my preferred web browsers mean that I don’t get the IE problems with pop-ups etc. I don’t run a Microsoft email client (eg Outlook or Entourage) so again no issues there. I have Spam filtering on email. The main problem is more like security vulnerabilities rather than old-fashioned virus attacks. But, in all defence situations, it is good to cover the options. So let me see how Virus Barrier goes.

I would encourage all to take their security seriously. Protection - appropriate protection coupled with a good dose of common sense and suspicion.