If your careful, you don't even need anti-virus for PC.
It's all marketing to paranoia.
Can I have 5-10 minutes on the net with your windows pc? I will show you in that time why it's not pointless to have Antivirus on a Windows system. No porn sites either.
i run clamvax (free) and the mac osx tiger firewall. i find them great and i havnt passed any viruses on or had any on my mac (if there are any out there)
Right. So that's what is used for malicious purposes then I suppose. So if I block that plus enable stealth mode would that provide adequate protection?
Are you directly connecting to the internet or are you connecting through a wireless or wire router? If you're going through a router, then the firewall on your actual Macbook isn't really necessary.
I don't know if I'd worry about it then. There's not really a need for a firewall on a Dial-up account. Every time you dial in there's a new IP assigned.
Mac Specs: White MacBook @ 2ghz, 1 gig of ram, 100GB HDD
Ok I just ordered my MacBook.
Also bought Mac OS X for Dummies.
So for right now I should not go ahead and purchase Norton Internet Security for the Mac (running it for my Windows based machine)?
I don't know if I'd worry about it then. There's not really a need for a firewall on a Dial-up account. Every time you dial in there's a new IP assigned.
A few years ago I was rebuilding my Windows 2000 machine (I had dial-up). Every time I tied to get some OS updates, the machine would blue-screen on me at about the same point, but not exactly. The only "fix" was to start from scratch. At first I thought an update was messing up my very-out-of-date base install. Then I thought about it and realized it was one of the many viruses that attack remote systems. Yes, on dial-up. I installed zone alarm before connecting and the problem stopped and no more blue-screen during the updates.
The only big difference between getting infected via dial-up and broadband is the speed. It is still absolutely possible.
Now, Macs on the other hand, don't have that problem due to the lack of viruses. But should there be an exploit that allows for remote access...a firewall is never a bad idea. Even if you dial into a private address space at your ISP and are behind their firewall, you still have your fellow subscribers who could be compromised and are on the same subnet as you.
Bottom line: It may not be absolutely necessary to have a firewall with a Mac, but it doesn't hurt to have one. I prefer hadware firewalls like Linksys/D-Link. And they do (or at least did) make them with analog modems. I had a D-link brand router/modem, but I never got it to work right with my ISP.
Though I have never used a mac, I switched from windoze to linux last year, primarily due to security concerns, and secondarily because I was beginning to get afraid of Microsoft Economics. I have some experience with linux desktop security as an average user, and I'd like to share it here, hoping that the same principles apply to macs too (as it's based on freeBSD)
Firewall: Linux has built-in firewall. One just has to configure it using iptables or a gui-enabled program like firestarter. The firewall is pretty transparent to the user and shows all the connections to and from the computer, and the rejected packets/connections in red color. I kept the linux desktop on for almost 24 hours a day, and it never got owned/hacked despite reckless web surfing and hosting websites from my desktop using Apache. Absolutely flawless security in Linux!!
Antivirus: Clamav (=clamaXav for macs) was included with my Linux distro (Ubuntu dapper drake). It was just a scanner, not real-time virus monitor. I never had any viruses on my linux partition despite downloading tons of stuff. I guess it may be because the stuff was largely open source softwares, and the community does an impeccable job at reading the source code. I got a virus from a friend on request (he got his PC killed), and clamav was able to clean that virus, which earlier had evaded norton antivirus on my friend's PC.
In about 10 years, I got viruses about a dozen times on windoze. In about one year of Linux use, I got none. This might have happend because few/no wild virii exist for linux (same with OS X).
In a nutshell, I am fully confident about the security of macs, but will have clamaXav antivirus for scanning my emails etc. lest it should infest my friends who use windoze. I'll also tinker around with mac firewall to see the performance, despite being behind a firewalled router.
Security: Windoze, linux and mac
