Mac in an office enviroment

[Mircera]

Hi everyone,

I have finally convinced my boss to let me use my macbook pro at work, but the terms for letting it in on the network is that it must have some antivirus program.

Now, from what i know thats not nessesary as viruses can't harm OSX itself. What i need to know is if mac can carry a virus(altho not infected itself) which spreads out to other OS's. If thats the case, would an antivirus program help, or are they only focused on what can harm OSX?

 

[jonbravo77]

Hi everyone,

I have finally convinced my boss to let me use my macbook pro at work, but the terms for letting it in on the network is that it must have some antivirus program.

Now, from what i know thats not nessesary as viruses can't harm OSX itself. What i need to know is if mac can carry a virus(altho not infected itself) which spreads out to other OS's. If thats the case, would an antivirus program help, or are they only focused on what can harm OSX?

They are more worried about you possibly getting a file that has a virus attached to it and spreading it to the server (if they have one). They are not focused on the Mac OS more on the Windows machines that are in the office... You can get clamav or I use iAntiVirus, both non-intrusive to the Mac OS and will protect the network machines.

 

[Mircera]

Great thanks Jonbravo

 

[VoR]

A virus wouldn't 'spread' by itself, but you could still be sending or giving access to infected files. You could also have some other type of malware actually running without knowing, and having this on your local network could cause any amount of security issues.
You've been asked to install an AV so do it, why argue? The consequences of ignoring this could be nasty and even if your machine wasn't at fault, you'd probably be blamed.

 

[Mircera]

Hey VoR,

Thats exactly why i wanted to look into it I don't mind installing AV, but i just felt like if the AV's for mac wasn't good due to the level of virus activity for *nix/OS X etc, i wouldn't bother with it.

But thanks alot for your advice

 

[ppc750fx]

Install ClamAVX, and display the menu bar icon for the watchdog.

You don't need to actually use it or even have the watchdog watch anything -- just have it in the menu bar so that you can say "see? It's running!"