Mac OS X: security for macs

One more thought on AntiVirus at .Mac

HI
As a cross platform consulting specialist I support many clients who have both Macs and Windows in their home or business, often to enjoy the best of both worlds, such as having a Sports Car and a Pickup Truck in the garage, or in this case the Mac and a PC.

I do things such as new system setups, and networking or wifi planning, or file sharing, and LAN, WAN network protection and think youre going to find there to be very little need for much more than a Firewall. OS X has this built in, and you can continue to use your existing hardware firewall to serve both the Mac and your PC and both will benefit.

Depending on Filesharing and things such as iTunes music sharing between the Mac and Windows PC, the software firewalls in Windows XP and Macintosh OS X both have certain ports that need to be opened. Often just leaving the software firewalls turned off is best, assuming you are keeping both of them protected behind a hardware firewall like a Belkin, Linksys, or Apple Airport.

The Norton Internet Security is a bundle of software tools that are very aggressive in protecting a Mac, almost to the point of taking the ease of use, and Mac's simplicity, or fun away, and making many "On-Guard" PC type popups appear requesting permission to Scan, Block or otherwise interfere with your work flow while Norton jumps to Warn you about a minor event.

As was written in an earlier post, there are not any viruses or weakeneeses in OS X that warrant such an aggressive bundle as Norton provides unless you are very suspect of being snooped on somehow. Usually a hardware router/firewall is all one needs.

Your last concern, Antivirus from Norton as a separate product is also available for OS X and mostly protects you from sending along a virus from an MS Word or Excel file that a PC user sent with a Virus, or some emails that contain attachments that would not harm the Mac at all, but could make your PC friends resent you for unknowingly forwarding them a tainted email from a PC user who sent it to you in the first place.

The AntiVirus solution that might be most beneficial is to sign up for a .Mac trial account and the free downloads from Apple include a full version of AntiVirus software, I believe it is called Virex. Plus having the .Mac account interfaces with many other great features that tie your Mac to the rest of the built in software such as, iDisk, online data backups, Synchronizing bookmarks and address books between systems, email, web page publishing, games, iPhoto library sharing and numerous freebies they throw in monthly. After the trial I think the 1st year costs $69, and later $99 but you can buy a renewal subscription from Amazon.com for a discount which most people dont know about.

Hope this helps.

please email if you require more exact information

Jonathan
educateme@aol.com