I love my mac but have never had delusions of "superior security" and have always ran AV on it.

Hopefully this will change your mind if you think your mac is more secure than a PC.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/051211-mac-malware-goes-from-game.html?source=nww_rss

AHAHAHAH

HAHAHA, I wish. Then it could make a 17" laptop seem like a reasonable purchase. 

Thats the problem, 3rd party software.  A system needs it to be any use to us but you're at the mercies of a 3rd party outside the control of the OS designers.

As the companies build the stuff to work on any platform, it's going to give the hackers more ways to try get in

And it is getting worse.  The attacks are improving and I think Mac users may be a little less prepared for these tricks.  I hope Apple starts to open up to its users about the problem.  It may hurt their myth about "no viruses\malware" but it should help their users in the long run.


Full Story:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/26/mac_malware_game_changer/

This came in from SANS yesterday afternoon:


One of the not-much-talked-about new features in Snow Leopard aka OS 10.6 was a build in anti virus tool. However, up to now, the tool only looked for a small number of old malware samples, hardly ever found in the wild. This changed with today's OS X security update (2011-003). This latest update includes the ability to automatically download new signatures, just like for other anti malware software. In addition, signatures got added for the recent set of fake AV tools spreading for the Mac (Mac Defender).
XProtectUpdater, the new component downloading these updates, it configured using the system preferences according to some reports. But so far, I have not been able to find the configuration in either of the systems I installed the update on. (I will keep looking and maybe will update this later)
Update: Found it. The item is called Automatically update safe downloads list. It can be found in the Generaltab of the security settings. Iguess this is the least malicious sounding naming Apple could come up with. It is enabled by default.

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Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D.

SANS Technology Institute

Twitter (c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.org Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.