I love the way the article only quotes two people, both from companies that sell antivirus software. Not that their views should ignored just because of who they work for, but their self-interest was clear.
The first suggests that Apple should be encouraging their users to install antivirus software. My understanding is that Apple's position is the opposite: 3rd party antivirus software on OSX provides so little extra security that it is not recommended. Does anyone know of a 3rd party antivirus application that would have stopped flashback?
The second suggests Apple should do more to support older versions of OSX. I view it as a positive, security-wise, that Apple does such a good job of keeping its OSX users current. Mainly it does this by making new versions affordable, but discontinuing support for old versions is an important part of that.
Installing antivirus tools helps prevent infection of your computer by viruses, and helps prevent your computer from becoming a host used to spread viruses to other computers. These tools quickly identify suspicious content and compare them to known malicious content.
Quoting the Snow leopard one since that seems to be the most recent. They've also used stronger wording in the past: "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." and "Regularly check for viruses on your hard disk using an anti-virus program, especially if you download files from the Internet or share files with others."
While I agree that the state of AV software is generally rather poor and provides weak protection, I'd be surprised if the major AV choices didn't prevent a flashback infection at least by the time it had become commonly talked about.
The first suggests that Apple should be encouraging their users to install antivirus software. My understanding is that Apple's position is the opposite: 3rd party antivirus software on OSX provides so little extra security that it is not recommended. Does anyone know of a 3rd party antivirus application that would have stopped flashback?
The second suggests Apple should do more to support older versions of OSX. I view it as a positive, security-wise, that Apple does such a good job of keeping its OSX users current. Mainly it does this by making new versions affordable, but discontinuing support for old versions is an important part of that.