It also has a very bad reputation here in Apple Support Communities. After all, if one can't catch all the threats, then you must install them all. If you truly believe the fearmongering, then the only truly 100% safe answer is to install all three anti-virus products. The Flashback trojan clearly demonstrated that because it could not infect any system files without asking for a password, which a few people unfortunately provided. The kinds of threats that Windows users have to worry about simply don't exist on the Mac and they can't exist. I still don't recommend MacKeeper or any antivirus software. The anti-MacKeeper web site that was supposedly being blocked, was actually more malicious and fearmongering than MacKeeper itself. Not only was MacKeeper not blocking that website, it was very easy to uninstall. That sparked my curiosity so I installed MacKeeper to see for myself. This morning someone even claimed it is blocking a well-known anti-MacKeeper site. It has a very bad reputation here in Apple Support Communities. The same thing seems to have occured with MacKeeper. Once people start repeating a story, other people start believing in it without checking for themselves. I haven't seen any need for it in 12 years and I'm not going to let some fearmongering change my mind now. I used to work for an Apple Store years ago.Īll of these "threats" are just Windows malware, as you suspect. They were poorly disguised attempts to get people to open attachments.įull disclosure: I do not work for any entity associated with ClamXav or VirusBarrier Express or MacKeeper. I did not check all 91 of these threats that MacKeeper found, but the ones I did check out in the Mail application obviously contained malware. With Internet Security in the MacKeeper application, I clicked on the obvious button "Start antivirus scan" and it found 91 threats the others did not find. But the point is that I thought I was going to scan everything that needed to be scanned by clicking on the buttons that these applications' creators seemed to expect my to click. Perhaps ClamXav and VirusBarrier Express would have found those 91 threats if they had been configured correctly by me. I checked and found that these emails arrived before I did the other two scans with ClamXav and VirusBarrier Express, so those programs should have found these threats. 935,000 of my 1,052,289 files by simply clicking on the "Start antivirus scan" button. After running the other two free apps (ClamXav and VirusBarrier Express) I decided to try the antivirus part of this $38 app that I was trying out for free. It has as part of its suite of applications, Internet Security. I downloaded a trial version of MacKeeper since my Mac was running slow, has too many files, and I wanted to try to speed it up by paring down the number of files. It found no threats, which did not surprise me because I had previously run ClamXav and chose to remove all the threats it found. I assumed I was going to scan the who drive because I clicked on the "Full Scan" button. It was slow and scanned between 400,000 and 500,000 files on my internal drive which Disk Utility says has 1,052,289 files on it. Since I was looking for a more user-friendly interface for family members, I decided to try VirusBarrier Express. I believe it scanned less than half, but can't be sure. I assumed that I was scanning my whole drive when I started the scan, but it did not scan all my files. The interface for this free app was not really user friendly. I did not see the flashback trojan and I assumed the other threats were Windows viruses. Two days ago I ran the free ClamXav antivirus program I downloaded through the Apple's Mac App Store and it found between 400 and 500 threats. I am running Mac OS 10.7.3 on a MBP 13" with i7 processor.Ĭan anyone tell me why the creators of ClamXav and VirusBarrier Express would not want to do an initial scan of the folders that contain email attachments?
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