I don’t fully agree with the point of the article over at PC World. It is true that malware authors are beginning to target mac users more often but I don’t think running anti-virus on the mac is the key solution. Operating systems are created by humans and will always have flaws. However, if users became savvy enough to not install codecs or anything else from an untrusted source security becomes much harder to breach.
Notice I said malware is attacking users. Thats because once an OS requires the user to input a password to elevate privileges to do admin like stuff the easiest attack vector is the user. If the user is on there toes then the number of malware writers that can write viable exploit code dwindles to a small handful.
It has been proven that the current tactics employed by anti-virus is collapsing under the weight of the malware writers product. McAfee had 100,000 virus definitions in September 2004. The number of virus definitions for McAfee in 2008 is expected to reach 400.000. Anti-virus vender’s have little chance to keep up with the onslaught in coming years. User awareness and education is the only viable course for the future. After all It’s not Unix, BSD, Linux, Windows or OS X thats being attacked most often. It’s the user.
Subscribe to my Blog