Anti-Virus in Leopard?

[menziep]

Since Leopard is going to have Built-In Support for Boot Camp, and since the mac platform userbase is getting bigger, may one of the Secret Features be a Anti-Virus for the "What if" or "Just In Case" scenario.

Being free would give it a clear advantage over Windows Vista and Good value for money!

Please Post your Comments!

 

[Josias]

If you get a virus on your Windows partition, it won't and can in nobody not nohow any way affect your Mac partition. It would be like installing Half Life 2 in the windows partition, and then Half Life 2 suddenly appearing in the Mac partition, and you being able to run it.

No antivirus in Leopard. Only the standard Mac OS X security with no irritating popupping guides telling you you don't have a firewall, because you're on a winblows.

 

[seanf]

If you get a virus on your Windows partition, it won't and can in nobody not nohow any way affect your Mac partition.

So a Virus that formats the drive where your Mac partition resides will have no affect?

Sean

 

[0010101]

I've seen some nasty Winblows viruses that could really jack up a persons hard drive, including their Linux partition.

The solution? Don't use Windows.

 

[Josias]

Sure, there are viruses that will crack up the entire compute. RAM etc., but here a Leopard antivirus won't work, since Leopard won't be running while you get the virus.

 

[speakerwizard]

it sounds to me like he meant antivirus for your windows install, i would assume you meant it would be on the drivers cd you need to install, could work i suppose like that.

 

[solvs]

I don't see why Apple should. M$ should, it's their stupid product. But AFAIK, unless you get a particularly nasty virus I'm not aware of, least not one that would run on the current and future version of Windows, I think Leopard will be safe. No BIOS, and no access to the Mac portion of your drive from Windows, probably even with MacDrive, so no way to affect Leopard. Especially if you save your surfing for OS X, and use a hardware firewall as well as they built in ones.

If nothing else, there are some free AVs out there, but none of the ones I've tried have been any good.

 

[projectle]

Just go grab a copy of Avast! Antivirus for Windows... That stops pretty much everything around.

Just go for the Home version (the free one) as the real difference is just a more professional looking UI rather than a Media Player Inspired one, and a database of all the known viruses out there so you can find out when they were first seen in the wild, what they do, what they affect and how to get rid of them if you have a preexisting infection.

 

[bousozoku]

The server version of Tiger already includes ClamAV, a free (and open source?) solution. There is even a GUI to control it that's available for free.

It would be simple enough to download that to run on Leopard and it could possibly check your Windows partition. Of course, if it's an NTFS partition, you wouldn't be able to repair anything, just detect viruses.

Of course, since the HFS+ file system used on Macs by default is available in source code, it wouldn't be surprising to see a Windows virus that compromised a Mac OS X partition.