There are some people saying that people should use an antivirus software on Mac
ID: 661272 • Letter: T
Question
There are some people saying that people should use an antivirus software on Mac. And there are thousands of people claiming that Macs don't get viruses (under this term I mean spyware / malware as well), some even say that it's just a trick from antivirus companies to say that there is a need for antivirus.
Honestly, I'm a bit confused. I don't want to waste resources on a possible unnecessary antivirus software, but I want to have my computer safe.
If it's common knowledge that Macs don't get viruses for quite some years now, shouldn't there be some bad people thriving to prove this wrong?
Explanation / Answer
I'll answer in the form of an anecdote.
Back in 2003, I was working in tech support for a Mac-based organisation. We were essentially a government contractor and, as such, nearly all our money came from sending Microsoft Word documents to the government to document what we had done and what we should be paid for.
Someone managed to bring a Word macro virus into the system. It executed only within Microsoft Word but the macro language is the same across Windows and Mac computers so it ran just fine. As well as documents, it could infect the preferences file and after that, any Word document you opened up on that same computer. As files were shared around, more and more computers were infected. Shortly, we found that we couldn't submit the Word documents to the government agency responsible for paying us because they were rejected at their email gateway.
On a Windows machine, the virus in question also attempted to deleted the C: drive. Of course, that didn't work on a Mac so we were unaware that we even had the virus. It didn't affect us until we sent it to the government.
The clean up was a big pain. The computers were spread from Cairns to Adelaide and there were only three of us in the IT department.
The key point here is that even malware that doesn't affect your Mac can still affect your life and/or business.