Automating ClamAV

I think it is important to scan for viruses, if only to prevent forwarding them. I think it is foolish to rely on the relative low market share of Apple (or hope & prayer) for protection. Also the Sony Music CD fiasco has shown us that MS, Symantec, *and* Apple can NOT be trusted as far as our security is concerned. I have been using clamXav for a while and it has found an E-mail type virus and never interfered with any other application or caused me any trouble at all.

I only wish there were root-kit and malware detectors for OS X!

How about some comments about Clam AV? I looked into installing this on my work computer, but backed off after reading how technical it would be to install - even with the GUI (ClamXay). I'd like to continue in my smugness of using a Mac, but I'd also like a simple, painless way of being "protected" and up to date. How does ClamAV effect system performance? Does it interfere with any of the bigger applications out there (Adobe/Macromedia's suite, Office)?

From my knowledge, by formatting your boot camp XP partition as NTFS, it cannot write to the OS X partition and vice versa, only the partition booted from can be read/written to it's respective OS. Also, it's considered common courtesy to the windows users on your network to use an anti-virus program at least for scanning your email. Macs can supposedly be carriers of the virus (without being infected) of course. Although, honestly I've never heard of such a case and i personally have NEVER run any kind of anti-virus software on a mac in my 14+ years of experience. And i do hope/pray that this will continue to be the case as the mac user base grows.

I always suspect Mac antivirus programs of being infectious agents themselves! I wonder, though, in the age of Boot Camp-- with Mac and Windows on the same drive, could a Windows virus screw up your Mac partition?

well, if you don't enter your admin (root) password for things that shouldn't need it then you should be fine. OS X does a pretty good job of being secure by design. not to mention the small user base makes macs less of a target and viruses have a harder time spreading as there are less machines to spread them. if you keep your computer up to date with updates and don't do anything too stupid there is no reason to have it

some argue for it saying 'be ready', and i used to have one for that very reason, but you know what. i didn't update it, there was nothing to update for, it didn't run in real time, in short, it was there but it wouldn't actually protect you if something got on your system.

there is Norton, but that actually open up security holes and makes your computer more at risk, it has also been know to give false positives that lead to kernel panics (my friend had that issue and it took forever to trouble shoot). it is NOT recommended you use it

How important is having anti-virus protection running on a Mac? I hear some people say you should always protect your Mac and I hear others say that anti-virus protection on a Mac is a waste of $. What are some opinions out there?