Viruses/Trojans - How do you know if your Mac/Unix is clean?

chrisgeary

chrisgeary

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In the Windows world, as we all know, AV and Malware detection is a fact of life. Unix platforms are generally thought to be virtually unaffected so most people don't use AV. Nothing is infallible. So the question is... if you don't run AV on your Mac/Unix workstation, how do you know if its clean?

At least in Windows, 99% of the time your detection process will alert you.
 
chrisgeary said:
In the Windows world, as we all know, AV and Malware detection is a fact of life. Unix platforms are generally thought to be virtually unaffected so most people don't use AV. Nothing is infallible. So the question is... if you don't run AV on your Mac/Unix workstation, how do you know if its clean?

At least in Windows, 99% of the time your detection process will alert you.
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uh oh, potential fanboy thread alert :police:

:runaway:

lol but yes in all seriousness, you could just assume (like we do with our macs) that theyre clean..

but i think the tide will start to turn on mac threats as more people use them. in MY OPINION the necessity for AV on macs is a couple years away yet but coming closer.
 
I'm afraid that migrating from the PC world I purchased the Intego software. Besides an AV such as Firewall, Backup & Anti-Spam, it has many other good features with little overhead. IMHO worth purchasing
 
Not sure on MAC/Unix but pure UNIX should be safe as houses as long as you really haven't screwed up user/file/folder permissions...
 
Never heard of a UNIX AV before tbh. Firewalls of course although it's very easy on UNIX to close all the ports down and only open what you need :D
 
neil_g said:
but then look at the end user market share UNIX has, im sure if it was more substantial then people looking to steal users details/cash would write some nasty..
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It's not so much the amount of users using the systems but where the systems are deployed. I used to be a SUN/Solaris consultant and a lot of big finance houses/banks, Oil companies use predominantly UNIX systems in their datacentres for DB's holding exactly the sort of information your on about.

The reason being is the UNIX boxes are a lot more secure and a lot more reliable. But less user friendly and not ideal for home use, must get my old SUN Ultra 60 fired up again lol.
 
Firewalls should go without saying. Its the threats that come through the open ports, mainly web surfing, I'm thinking about. I started thinking about this recently when a torrent site that has been in the media a lot started infecting my PC with trojans. I've started accessing it via ubuntu/OSX. Ok, its not hard to clean Windows up but it got me thinking about operating systems that have traditionally been thought safe, but how safe are they without a tool to convince you all is well? How would you know something malicious wasn't going on?

You could quite rightly argue that I shouldn't be frequenting sites purveying illegal content! :D
 
TheNissanMan said:
a lot of big finance houses/banks, Oil companies use predominantly UNIX systems in their datacentres for DB's holding exactly the sort of information your on about.

The reason being is the UNIX boxes are a lot more secure and a lot more reliable. But less user friendly and not ideal for home use, must get my old SUN Ultra 60 fired up again lol.
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yeah but look at where those UNIX boxes are placed, behind massive corporate firewalls.

more secure because no one has spent the time writing code? ;)

re infection via torrents - depends where you get your torrents from to be honest. but then any pirate application can contain malware..
 
Part of the reason UNIX is so secure is not the fact that they are behind corporate firewalls (thinking of the peeps like me at home) but the fact everything is process based and a lot more security is built into the OS as it is.

My box is pretty tied down if I want anything to run that would affect the system I will have to run it using SUDO so in effect password protected, all ports are closed down so secure telnet/ftp in and out, root account has been played with etc...
 
I run iAntivirus twice a year on my Mac, never come across anything untoward yet.
 
I recently got Macscan - found a couple of tracing cookies but thats about it. It does feel weird not have AV/Malware running (and in response to neil_gs request for a fanboi) and making the computer sooo sloooow to start and shutdown.:naughty:

Chris
 
TheNissanMan said:
Part of the reason UNIX is so secure is not the fact that they are behind corporate firewalls (thinking of the peeps like me at home) but the fact everything is process based and a lot more security is built into the OS as it is.

My box is pretty tied down if I want anything to run that would affect the system I will have to run it using SUDO so in effect password protected, all ports are closed down so secure telnet/ftp in and out, root account has been played with etc...
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If you open up port 22 for ssh do you find you get a lot of dictionary / baby's name attacks on it? I do ...

I'll be sat in my study and the hard disk of my debian box will start going click click click. I'll ssh in and look at auth.log and find someone trying umpteen different user account names or attempts to log in as root. No-one has ever got in, not that there's much there to find if they did :D.

I also get plenty of people trying to see if I'm running an open mail relay. Nope, I only relay for my own subnet or someone providing valid auth credentials (so my iphone can relay email via home rather than using a webmail provider).
 
As saoid haven't had mine up and running for a good while, not enough time in the day unfortunately :(

Will get it sorted as soon as things quieten down at work (although hoping they don't) as was good fun playing and need to get back into it properly!
 
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