Apple Admits Virus Threat, Recommends Antivirus Utilities

That's only a hoax, with no reference or link to Apple words, links, articles or comments.

Hi Marco,

I have updated the article and included a link to the knowledge base piece you were so skeptical about. Also note that parts of the text body are specifically highlighted (bold, italics, and a slightly darker color) to reflect that they are actual Apple statements from the Support page in question. Hope this clarifies things for you.

Here's the link again, just in case you miss it in the text:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2550?viewlocale=en_US

Read carefully that article: no virus vulnerability was mentioned or reported.
They simply encourage the use of several different products in order to make more hard the work for virus design.

Look at the side bar, look for related articles talking about "Virus". None.

I use Mac since 1985 (I use Linux and Windows, too), and it's since 2001 that I no longer use anti-viruses.
You can meet "malware" (i.e.: a malicious script that you download, launch, and provide your password when prompted, if you're a real dumbass), but... viruses?

That's the hoax.
The only "viruses" you can find using a Mac are viruses for Windows, infesting the internet, that are simply ignored by Mac OS X.

The Antivirus products mentioned above are used only in order to check for windows viruses, in order to avoid to pass them to some poor windows user. I refuse to waste money, time and CPU on my Macs only because Windows is that poor piece of software.

well one of them comes with a firewall ect. which can be handy in itself

The Apple article you link has been removed.

It was a 13 yo article, from 1995, when Mac OS wasn't Unix and there were several (about 20) existing viruses for the ancient Mac OS, most of them harmless.

You could consider a rectification.

Indeed, Apple has removed the KnowledgeBase article containing reference to antivirus utilities for Macintosh computers, but most importantly, containing Apple's recommendations to use such software on machines running OS X. We caught the news in time and did a followup which you can view here.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Apple-Now-Denies-Need-for-Antivirus-Software-99194.shtml

The situation still isn't very clear, with Apple's Bill Evans stating "...running antivirus software may offer additional protection," whereas Apple's stance is still Macs-are-virus-free. We're still waiting for Apple to give the final say on Mac antivirus utilities (are they, or are they not necessary?).

We just got a downloader virus on our Mac 10.5.5 laptop. Whenever we typed in a Web site, it redirected to another Web site--the same one every time. The computer was barely running. We ran Norton Anti-Virus for Macs and it identified a Downloader virus and an IRC Trojan and it dumped them. Now the computer runs fine, and we can type in Web sites and get there, but when we use Google to search, it goes back to that same Web site, so it seems that the virus is still lurking. Does anyone know how we can get this off? Or is this not the forum to ask such a question. If not, does anyone know of such a forum?