[OS X TeX] OT: effective Macintosh Trojan in the wild

Maarten Sneep maarten.sneep at xs4all.nl
Thu May 5 05:12:23 EDT 2005


On May 5, 2005, at 8:51 AM, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> As an antivirus on OS X I only used Virex, and actually purchased  
> my .Mac subscription essentially to get it. With Tiger Apple  
> recommend against it (by saying it's only for Panther), though  
> without telling the why.

I tried to install it (7.2, through my ISP), and it can't connect to  
retrieve updates to its definitions. There may be some other parts  
that interfere with normal operation of the OS.

On May 5, 2005, at 10:19 AM, Thorsten Scheffner wrote:
> I read the discussion about viruses on mac and want to add one  
> scanner: I use clamAV ( http://www.clamav.net ) as antivirus tool  
> with ClamXav ( http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/ 
> 24449 ) as gui frontend. It is a freeware scanner for unix, mac and  
> win. It is really slow, a scan of my 30 GB-volume took about 2,5  
> hours and it does not find viruses on the classic enviroment. But  
> it seems to "know" a lot of different viruses. Worth a look, I think.

ClamAV is commonly used to scan incoming mail for virusses. Its main  
advantage (especially for mail scanning) is that the definitions can  
be updated very quickly: they actually advise you to update them  
every 30 minutes or so (they use differences between updates, so the  
network load isn't that bad). In emergency situations (Sober.ZZZ  
suddenly appears), you can add your own scanning signature.

I noticed that I now have a deamon user for ClamAV on Tiger (I did a  
clean install), so Apple knows about it in any case.

Maarten
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