14 DAY TRIAL // Originating on the Intego blog, a new Snow Leopard find may indicate Macs are not so immune to malware. In fact, Apple itself seems to be taking security issues more seriously with the latest version of Mac OS X, something that doesn’t quite fall well with its latest Get a Mac ads.
In its latest TV commercials, Apple continues to bash PCs for being highly unreliable and prone to getting infected by viruses, whereas the Mac is downright immune to these threats. However, the people at Intego (security company) have posted a report on their blog saying that, “Snow Leopard contains an antivirus.”
Corroborated by Snow Leopard testers over at the MacRumors forums, the screenshot shows the malware-check feature working with a file download via Safari. Upon extracting the contents of the downloaded disk image, Snow Leopard detected a version of the RSPlug Trojan horse, Intego reports.
“We’ve gotten reports about an interesting feature in Snow Leopard, the new version of Mac OS X due for release this Friday,” the company writes on its blog. “According to reports we’ve seen – and the screen shot below – Snow Leopard contains an AntiMalware feature.”
Snow Leopard checks for malware
Credits: Intego “We’re not sure yet exactly how this works,” Intego continues, “but the above screen shot shows this feature working with a download made via Safari, detecting a version of the RSPlug Trojan horse in a downloaded disk image. We’re naturally curious about this feature, and about how thorough it is.”
Even Intego is startled by the discovery of a Snow Leopard “antivirus” on the heels of Apple’s airing two new Get a Mac ads talking about the security of Macintosh computers. “We wonder just how serious Apple thinks the malware threat is, especially since their latest Get a Mac ads highlight the fact that PCs running Windows suffer from viruses…,” Intego concludes.