I was reading Mac Format magazine the other day, and saw an article about a new Trojan Horse virus that is in the wild for the Mac platform. The way this works is by some “must download” software, such as a poker game. Once installed, the Trojan Horse embeds itself in your Mac system files and gets to work on opening back door access for an unscrupulous hacker to compromise your system.

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Now this is worrying, though inevitable, that virus writers are targeting the OS X, but what still remains constant is that you have to physically install the thing first (which is different to how things used to be on windows, when the virus could install itself). Granted the virus is being embedded in a seemingly harmless package, but you still have to install it yourself. It seems that with a little vigilance it shouldn’t be a problem. In fact if you are installing software from an unknown and untrusted source then you can expect a virus to infect the system.

With all this in mind, I did take interest in reading about a piece of anti virus software for the Mac called iAntivirus (www.iantivirus.com). This is a free piece of software that interestingly only contains definitions for Mac viruses. It also takes up very little in the way of system resources, a real bonus of many of the commercial systems out there. Only having Mac definitions does cut down on the bloat, and to be fair a windows virus wouldn’t work in Mac OS. The problem though does come with email attachments, without Windows definitions you could unknowingly forward an email to a Windows using friend which contains some form of virus. Again vigilance comes into it, taking steps to avoid infection, rather than relying on antivirus software to protect you.

It does mark a significant turning point though, with Mac sales on the up, and Apple’s share of the home computer market gradually increasing, it was only a matter of time before virus creators started to target our humble computers. So this leads me to the question that sticks out in my mind, can us Mac users still be complacent? Or do we need to start being more vigilant?