On Nov 18, 2016, at 7:02 AM, Bill Spencer <wspen...@jhu.edu<mailto:wspen...@jhu.edu>> wrote:
Hi there: My wife has lately been getting spam emails, allegedly from her email provider, which include links to click to resolve "problems"--you know the drill. She has not taken the bait, but when I contacted the provider on her behalf to triple-check that her account is still in the clear, I got quite a lengthy sales pitch for all sorts of Mac-related anti-virus and security stuff that they want us to buy. I have never really worried about that sort of thing in the past, but times do change and I thought I would see what the received wisdom is nowadays about the need for such programs...and if there is a need, what to install. She's on 10.10.5 and I'm on 10.11.something. So long as her system is set to update automatically, Apple routinely pushes out new definitions for their built-in anti-malware stuff so there’s that protection first off. The overwhelmingly vast majority of malware out there still targets Windows (and increasingly Android) so a security suite for OS X is, in my professional opinion, largely unnecessary. If you want a more detailed analysis mention what they’re offering. (If it says Intego or Norton’s anywhere in the name it’s garbage, IMO) If you want to pay for a decent one, ClamXAV is inobtrusive, low on resource use and flexible. <http://www.clamxav.com> It used to be shareware now it’s commercial, $30 for any computer you own. ($21 if either of you are associated with an EDU institution) My University provides us with Sophos Antivirus, which is also not half-bad, but requires an annual subscription. As our UA policy (especially in a college that routinely deals with HIPAA-protected data) requires that all computers, regardless of OS run some sort of antivirus, I’ve gotten ClamXAv, mainly because it lets me manually scan any mounted volume or folder, whereas Sophos only protects the boot volume. Since I have to routinely mount ‘foreign' disks this is useful. But any antivirus or antimalware software is necessarily reactive; they only protect against threats they know of, and most of the current threats aren’t viruses, but ransomware, keyloggers to steal banking credentials, and ‘fake antivirus’ offers. Apple’s taken some big strides ‘under the hood’ in 10.11 and 10.12 in locking down and protecting the system to guard against this kind of thing, too, as a proactive step…even root doesn’t have access to some parts of the OS without special authentication being provided, but your userland files are susceptible to ransomware encryption. Fortunately none of the known variants are currently able to encrypt Time Machine volumes, so it’s not a major deal for Mac users if you’re backing up your stuff. Vigilance against the phishing (and they’re ALWAYS phishing emails, no matter how official they sound), and keeping good backups are, in the end, better than any anti-malware solution, and it sounds like your wife is well versed in the ‘delete key’ method of dealing with them :-) Backing up your stuff is important, because drive failure, computer failure, damage or theft is much more likely than a malware infection. -- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs -- You received this message because you are a member of the iMac Group, a group for those using Apple iMacs and eMacs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to imaclist@googlegroups.com To leave this group, send email to imaclist+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/imaclist --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "iMac Group" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to imaclist+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
