Hacker News Reader

Comment by teilo | Hacker News Reader

I run a mac-heavy shop. About 40 of them at present.

The naysayers who want to downplay this as business as usual are wrong.

I have had three cases of this within two weeks at my company. Prior to that time, I have not had a single piece of Mac malware infect my machines over a period of 8 years.

This is not business as usual. I expect to find a whole lot more of this in the near future, and for the first time since I've managed IT at this company, I'm researching anti-malware solutions for Mac.

View on HN

ClamXav is fine: http://www.clamxav.com/

By the way, all this only encourages me to keep using ADBlock+ ...

> I'm researching anti-malware solutions for Mac.

I'd advise you to educate your users (as not to enter their passwords every time the computer asks them for no apparent reason), run proper backups and check Safari (and other browser) defaults.

As an alternative to anti-malware? You're kidding, right?

Do you really think that Mac users are inherently less gullible than Windows users?

I have been in this business long enough to know that there are always certain users who will click anything that pops up on their screen, no matter how clearly you try to convince them otherwise. If education solves your future Mac virus problem, then more power to you. But that's just not the real world.

Gullibility isn't even necessary to have machines get infected by malware. There have been cases in the past of ad networks serving ads infected by flash zero days. You don't have to run a downloaded executable to get an infected machine.

Exactly. I'm not worried about downloading an email, most of the non-savvy users I know understand not to do that anymore, I'm worried about something like Flash being the vector of the virus.

I could be incorrect, but if you require administrative rights to install anything (so your users can't), wouldn't this solve the problem (at least in this case?)

Understandably, this would require you to micro-manage all your users who want to have their own, specialized setups, but...

You can not even begin to understand what micromanaging users' installs is like until you have tried it. You will either change your tune quickly or bring on a whole team of people to focus on that goal (which is what the large companies do).

You don't need to solve your future problems. Solve the present ones. Mac users may have become comfortable with their false sensation of security, but now is the time to teach them to be suspicious and to put them on your side.

Good luck with your search for anti-malware. For what I have seen on the windows side of the fence, things aren't pretty.

Any real solution goes through user education. When they know what to expect from their computers, they become much more difficult targets. You may enlist the help of some clever programs, but software won't solve the problem.

Do I have to repeat the mantra, "Security is not a product, it's a process" to satisfy your pedantic streak?

Why is it that you assume that I am not educating my users just because I am looking into Mac anti-virus software? Did I say that anti-virus software is the end-all be-all of security?

I have windows users here also. Every one of them runs anti-virus, and it has saved my department countless hours cleaning or rebuilding machines. I have the metrics to prove it.

If you really think that an enterprise can get along with education alone, you clearly have not spent much time in the IT support trenches, dealing with the average computer user.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com