It is with great pride that you you will hear Mac users, owners and genius(pl) tell you that due to the rigidity of OSX and the super tightness of its code that the Mac doesn’t need an anti-virus.
“How is it so secure? There are a number of answers to this question, but it’s primarily due to a technique known as sandboxing. Essentially, sandboxing is a form of software virtualization that runs programs and processes in an isolated virtual environment, thus giving them limited access to your system and everything on it. Secondarily is a system called library randomization, which makes it harder for malicious programs to find their targets, coupled with this there are dozens of other security features that make the OSX operating system so tight.”
However there is another truth behind this story and it is this. The Mac has less risk of virus(pl) attacks as hackers spend less time targeting Macs. This was primarily because a lot fewer people had them, so the virus would have been targeting a minority, so why bother, you could easily get enough victims by targeting Windows machines.
This are changing though! Macs are getting hugely more popular, and people are buying them, as numbers increase, so too will hackers interest in the machines.
The simply fact is people put the same info into a Mac as they do a PC, bank details, personal details, passwords and so on…
This makes the Mac more attractive to the hacker now. More Macs, more reason to hack, more chance of a virus or malicious code and more chance of personal loss.
It is for this reason that I am now moving away from the mindset of “I have a Mac there I am safe.”
I am now of the mindset “I have a Mac so I am safer, and I can be safer still with an Anti Virus program.”
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