Anti-virus/Malware software?

[Byte Stryke]

I thought Mac users called malware "apps"

[spyder]

Thanks for the advice guys. I put malwarebytes on and ran a scan... found nothing....... Maybe my computer is just getting ready to fall apart....

[Byte Stryke]

I have the perfect low system requirement and truly virus free OS for you.

[cfortune]

I love when people say "I don't run anything and I'm clean". The best malware an attacker can use is the kind that you don't know is there. If someone gets a key logger on your machine, they don't want it to show, they just want to see when you go to wellsfargo.com and the next two things you type in.

Not having anything isn't necessarily a good thing.

[cstone]

That won't be much help to most people, but it's a very cool concept. I know one member here that uses this setup exclusively.

I have an old laptop with no harddrive that runs on a live version of Puppy Linux - it's only a 128MB ISO, so it boots from a USB flash drive. I save no session activity so when I'm done I can turn it off (or I could just yank the battery, no harm done) and it's like it never happened. Boot it back up and I have a clean slate. The only downside is you can't store anything on it. Great for questionable activities that you don't want local record of, or browsing sites that are likely to harbor malware.

I ran into a server farm where all of the machines were running a version of Linux from a CD. When ever the sysadmins wanted to update the machines, they would respin a new distro, duplicate the disks, FedEx them to the hosting company running the farm and have the attendant (not a sysadmin by a long stretch) replace all of the CDs in the drives. The machines would be scheduled for a reboot and they would all come back up fresh and patched. The OS ran in RAM and the source was read only from the CD.

The real sysadmins ran everything remotely. Some of them were in other countries. If a system was hacked, the system would be rebooted as many times as necessary until the exploit was identified, patched, and new distros spun, dupped, and shipped to the farm.

This was several years ago and I am still way impressed by the concept. I'm sure Byte, Jayock, Foxtrot and some others have seen even more impressive systems.

OSs are cheap. Data is valuable. Real computer users never have just one copy of their data, and sysadmins don't keep data in the same place as their OS.

Be safe (even in the virtual world)

[cstone]

I love when people say "I don't run anything and I'm clean". The best malware an attacker can use is the kind that you don't know is there. If someone gets a key logger on your machine, they don't want it to show, they just want to see when you go to wellsfargo.com and the next two things you type in.

Not having anything isn't necessarily a good thing.

If you can't physically secure it, you have no hope of virtually securing it.

[Byte Stryke]

OSs are cheap. Data is valuable. Real computer users never have just one copy of their data, and sysadmins don't keep data in the same place as their OS.

Be safe (even in the virtual world)

Amen




get a small (60-80GB) drive and install your OS on it.
Get TWO or more drives, MIRROR them, Name it M-O:/ put your docs pictures on it.

Learn the difference between full and incremental backups.
BACK IT UP DAILY.

you'd think that Gun owners would understand that bad shit happens to everyone... Usually at the least expected time.
not always the case.

[cmailliard]

I love when people say "I don't run anything and I'm clean". The best malware an attacker can use is the kind that you don't know is there. If someone gets a key logger on your machine, they don't want it to show, they just want to see when you go to wellsfargo.com and the next two things you type in.

Not having anything isn't necessarily a good thing.

Don't get me wrong, it's not like I don't check, I just do not have something running all the time. This was my problem with Norton and McAfee, they took up so many cycles working in the background that your cpu couldn't keep up, having more than three applications running bogged the computer down horribly.

I check usually once a week. The Mac App Store has a free Norton App that does a nice job. In two years not a single threat has shown up. There are not many choices for Anti- software to run a Mac.

When I was working for the .gov our computer systems had username and passwords that could only be entered using your mouse and clicking buttons on the screen. The location of the keys on the screen would change with every login. It was a pain in the ass to log in, but it was secure.

[Byte Stryke]

Don't get me wrong, it's not like I don't check, I just do not have something running all the time. This was my problem with Norton and McAfee, they took up so many cycles working in the background that your cpu couldn't keep up, having more than three applications running bogged the computer down horribly.

this is why you schedule it to update and then run at night when you are asleep

[buckshotbarlow]

I have the perfect low system requirement and truly virus free OS for you.

Ubuntu.com

Better yet just run a vm farm. Thats what I do. No biggy to restore the os from a clean snapshot if I have to go to a questionable site like co-ar15 gun pron.