Protect Your Mac For FREE – iAntiVirus Mac OSX

Posted August 12th, 2008 | 1 Comment

VIRUS One of the reasons I left the world of Microsoft was because of the amount of trojans, viruses and spyware that Windows would pick up. I literally spent hours removing it all, sometimes it was impossible and the only solution was to wipe everything and reinstall Windows.

Since getting my first Mac years ago (and several more since) I have never once installed anti virus or spyware software and thankfully I have never needed to.

That is still the case today, but unfortunately things may change in the future. With the success of the iPhone, the increase in Mac sales every year and iTunes & Safari being on PC the possibilities of trojans and viruses being aimed at Mac users is increasing all the time.

Trojan Found

It’s not a serious problem yet but the first major Mac OSX trojan was discovered earlier this year. AppleScript.THT Trojan Horse if installed turns on File Sharing, Web Sharing, and Remote Login granting hackers complete control over your system. It was found being distributed over Limewire and iChat.

iAntiVirus

So perhaps now would be a good time to invest in Mac AntiVirus software, something totally new to me! Luckily we don’t need to invest any money as I discovered a great FREE program iAntiVirus!

What’s great about iAntiVirus is that it looks for malware which is specifically targeted at the Mac, rather than many of the other antivirus solutions out there which include a vast database of Windows trojans, which the Mac is immune too anyway.

Simple, Stable, Secure

iAntiVirus is supposedly still in beta. But in the weeks i’ve been using it it’s never crashed and seems very stable and secure. It’s small and lightweight, only a 15mb download and installs in seconds.

Once installed it’s as simple as a Mac application should be! There are two main functions, Scan My Mac and Turn ‘Protect My Mac’ On or Off. The first thing I did was perform a quick scan and was happy that nothing malicious was found after the scan completed in under 5 minutes. I later tried a ‘normal scan’ which is more thorough but understandably takes a lot longer, around 3 hours, again the results were clean.

We don’t have anything to lose with iAntiVirus, it’s free, small, clean and although maybe not necessary at the moment, it may well be in the future. You can download it from here.

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