Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 25th Aug 2009 21:56 UTC
With Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard operating system arriving on people's doorsteps over the coming weekend, you'd think that all the new features are known by now, and there will be no more major surprises. Well, that's not entirely true: on Intego's Mac Security Blog, it is reported that Snow Leopard comes with anti-virus/malware functionality built-in. Update: Snow Leopard testers on MacRumors confirmed the functionality. How, exactly, it works, is not yet known, however.
Thread beginning with comment 380614
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2009-08-25
Well, I would say it's neither ClamAV or a commercial scanner. If one is developering an operating system, as Apple is, there are far more efficient ways of detecting malware, than to license a commercial scanner, trust me. It will probably be a very lightweight library, part of CoreServices.
Member since:2009-08-26
Member since:
2005-07-06
This is not the first Mac OS X version to bundle anti-virus. Mac OS X Server bundles ClamAV since a long time. Granted, mainly for the build-in mail server, but the local system could be scanned with it as well.
I wonder if Apple also replaced ClamAV with this solution in the mail server. I hope so. ClamAV is very bad at finding malware.
However, instead of licensing a commercial AV solution, I personally had preferred it if Apple made a few people work full-time on ClamAV. Other OSes would then benefit from it as well. Apple's decision is understandable, though. For them OSX security is more important than improving a bad OS-agnostic solution.