Let’s cut to the chase…

<rant> /* begin rant here*/

The Mac needs AntiVirus in the same way that a large cruise ship needs an encounter with an iceberg.

That means: not at all, never, at no point in time, not even if hell freezes over.

The PC isn’t exactly thriving because of AntiVirus and it never has. It’s one of the factors that has holed Windows below the waterline. I stopped reporting on the fact that AntiVirus Is Dead (as a technology) after I’d described how it didn’t work in 20 or 30 separate postings (just search this site for AVID).

AntiVirus is a crock. But in case you think it’s improved in the 18 months or so since I stopped regularly pointing out that it doesn’t work – it hasn’t. Last month, a research report from Stuart Staniford of FireEye explained that:

“In test of 36 commercial AntiVirus products fewer than half the newest malware programs were identified.”

AntiVirus hasn’t improved because AntiVirus is a broken technology. And that’s because it works in exactly the wrong way. Instead of authenticating what is good and rejecting everything else, it tries to identify the bad, and regularly fails.

How long is it since I pointed out that, in benchmarks of Antivirus software, NO PRODUCTS scored 100%? What part of “NO PRODUCTS” does the IT industry not understand.

That’s like saying “in tests of boats built by XYZ Boats, Inc. all boats delivered by the shipyard had holes in their hull.”

AV is broken and cannot be fixed.

</rant> /* rant ends here*/

The Mac does not need AntiVirus. And the PC could do with having it replaced by a technology that actually works. But let’s focus on the little Mac storm that blew up a few weeks ago.

Apple is schizophrenic about AntiVirus. The problem is that AV is a $4billion plus industry that advertises all the time and has convinced many people that AV is a good idea, using the same tactics that the Bush Administration used to convince US citizens that invading Iraq was a good idea. So every now and then someone in Apple mentions AV, probably because they’ve drunk the cool aid.

On November 21st Apple added a technical note to its support web site, which it later withdrew that stated something along the lines of  “Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.”

That’s a particularly dumb thing to say, because dedicated virus writers get copies of all AV products and test their viruses against them, only releasing their new viruses when they pass such tests. No surprise that Apple withdrew the remark. Every now and then Apple does dumb things. In fact Apple posted something similar in June 2007 and, once-upon-a-time on March 2002, it posted something similar.

Note that when Apple enabled the iPhone with apps, it introduced a whitelisting process. It authenticates all apps that you can load on the iPhone.

Microsoft has the beginnings of a whitelisting capability on Vista, but unfortunately it was poorly implemented and got in the way too much, so Vista allows you to turn all its authentication capability off.

So, is Security an Issue on the Mac?

Right now it isn’t much of an issue, but given the Mac’s growing usage, the Mac will become a hacker target and Mac users will have to become more aware of the threats. I’ll write more about this in my next posting, when I’ll explain a few things about the Mac and security, and provide some guidelines.