Mac virus scan.

Macs don’t get viruses. Well, OK, not much anyway.

In my decade of using Macs I have never run any anti-virus software and, as far as I know, never got a virus. If I have it has made no difference, as I have seen the grey OS ‘kernel panic’ screen maybe three or four times in that decade (absent when hacking and it was my own fault!). The last time this happened in regular use was maybe 4 years ago, so it’s not like I’m worrying.

This is why I tend to view the scare stories put out now and then by the major anti-virus app makers – McAfee and Norton – as so much disinformation intended to ramp up sales of their products. Indeed, while Apple constantly patches security holes in its Apps, the first time I recall them making an OS update for a virus was the 10.6.8 update of Snow Leopard a few weeks ago to stave off the MacDefender virus, whose Russian creator was just arrested a few days ago. The virus was funded by ChronoPay, Russia’s PayPal and evidently a brother under the skin when it comes to business ethics. Doubtless, they are paying off the KGB as you are reading this. (That’s Russia’s version of the plea bargain – Putin gets richer and life goes on as usual). What Apple was really staving off is user stupidity. This thing would pop up on the screen from nowhere asking you to download an anti-virus program, and would infect your Mac once you did so. Well, there’s one born every minute, as the old saying has it.

The other common invasion attempt is emails from fraudsters representing themselves as PayPal and asking that you ‘update your information’, part of which ‘update’ requires you enter your password. Well, duh! Known as ‘phishing’, the victim here deserves everything he gets and finds out soon enough when his PayPal account has been emptied. So now instead of PayPal and their partner in crime, eBay, cheating you, someone else has. Same difference. Good luck recovering a dime from PayPal, by the way.

However, the other day my eye was caught by a free virus scan utility curiously named ClamXav. A Mac source mentioned it so I downloaded it and scanned the 1tB HDD where my data – some 650gB – reside. 311 minutes later it reported 7 viruses among the 3 million + files it had scanned, all being phishing viruses in deleted and unopened emails. I zapped those and went away happy. Note to self: Trash deleted emails in future. Not bad when you consider those data files had gone through many migrations among successive machines over the past decade.

You can download ClamXav by clicking the picture below; the maker says its fully compatible back to OS Tiger, 10.4:

Click the picture to go to the ClamXav download page.

You really want to set this up on a ‘set-and-forget’ schedule, so after doing the first lengthy scan of all my data drives, I set ClamXav to do a daily virus definition update and to scan just my data directory (10 minutes) right after, thus:

Daily update and scan setting in ClamXav.

I’m using the app with OS 10.7 Lion, and tell ClamXav to quarantine infected files in a separate directory whence they are easily zapped. Remember to Empty Trash after deleting the bad files. Be sure to download it using the above link; the version downloadable from the Apple AppStore does not have full functionality, for some reason lost on me.