Norton Antivirus for Mac 10.4-10.6 installation issue

Any suggestions?

Yes. Remove the worthless Norton product.

Mac OS X versions 10.6.7 and later have built-in detection of known Mac malware in downloaded files. The recognition database is automatically updated once a day; however, you shouldn't rely on it, because the attackers are always at least a day ahead of the defenders. In most cases, there’s no benefit from any other automated protection against malware.

The most effective defense against malware is your own intelligence. All known Mac malware takes the form of trojans that can only operate if the victim is duped into running them. If you're smarter than the malware attacker thinks you are, you won't be duped. That means, primarily, that you never install software from an untrustworthy source. How do you know a source is untrustworthy?

• Any website that prompts you to install software, such as a “codec” or “plug-in,” that comes from that same site, or an unknown site, is untrustworthy.
• A web operator who tells you that you have a “virus,” or that anything else is wrong with your computer, or that you have won a prize in a contest you never entered, is trying to commit a crime with you as the victim.
• “Cracked” versions of commercial software downloaded from a bittorrent are likely to be infected.
• Software with a corporate brand, such as Adobe Flash, must be downloaded directly from the developer’s website. No intermediary is acceptable.

Follow these guidelines, and you’ll be as safe from malware as you can reasonably be.

Never install any commercial "anti-virus" products for the Mac, as they all do more harm than good. If you need to be able to detect Windows malware in your files, use ClamXav -- nothing else.

To add a few more details to Linc's post, see my Mac Malware Guide. If after reading that you still want anti-virus software, Norton is a very bad choice.

(Note that my pages contain links to other pages that promote my services, and this should not be taken as an endorsement of my services by Apple.)

The replies you got above are the usual stock replies I get anytime I post a question similar to yours. What you should look at doing is going to the Support Page for Norton products for Mac:

https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/norton-mac/current/contact?entsrc=direct_pub web

I have been succesful in chatting and emailing (both for free) with Norton people and gettting my issues resolved when my Norton installs or renewals don't work as planned. Hopefully your experience is the same. Good luck.

• I have been succesful in chatting and emailing (both for free) with Norton people

But the debate is not about the support one gets from "Norton people", it is about the Norton Antivirus product, and whether it is of any use to anyone other than Norton. After all there is a legion of Mac users who have never used Norton and yet have never had a virus.

Did you turn off your AV software and Apple firewall before you upgraded? Suggest you go to the Norton Support site for more assistance. You may have to use the Norton deinstall software and then reinstall Norton.

There really is no debate here. It is very clear that the person making the post had a problem with a Norton product that he wanted to resolve, and while removing the product is a solution I suppose, it was also pretty clear that he actually wanted a solution whereby he could use the Norton product and presumably do so without expending any additional money, which means that removing the program is not an optimal solution for him. While my suggestion may or may not lead to a solution that allows him to keep and use his program without spending any additional money, it better attempts to meet the desire of the person making the original post.

Have you actually investigated the malware detection rate of the product you're choosing to defend in a topic that has been dormant for a year? While not the worst, it's certainly not good, either. See:

http://www.thesafemac.com/mac-anti-virus-testing-01-2013/

So Thomas, is it safe to say now that Avast isn't on your sh** list anymore? When I mentioned it about a month ago, people on here kept shooting it down like it was the devil or something. :rolleyes:

What I despise on here are the users that keep saying that Mac's can't get viruses and that the worse that could happen is they get a file that's a PC virus but won't negatively affect the Mac. Well, while that may be true, that certainly doesn't keep that file from being passed on and hurting other people. Making sure your system is safe from viruses is something that should be done for both the owner and anyone they come in network contact with. After all, how safe is a Mac who's user keeps forwarding an infected email that they don't know is infected with some silly malware attachment because their system doesn't have anything on it to solve that problem at its core.

THAT is the biggest issue I have with the people on here who suggest not to run any AV software on a Mac. Just because you think you're immortal doesn't give you the right to walk around like Typhoid Mary. Being safe is also about minimizing the spreading of viruses/malware and not just about having an OS that can't be infected by 9x% of known wild viruses/malware.

But to go back to the resurrected thread topic, please god pick something other than Norton. lol

Avast has quite good detection rates. However, I've seen many cases where it suffers from false positives, in some cases identifying legitimate system files as malicious. So it's not one that I would recommend.

As for passing on PC malware, that's actually harder to do than everyone makes out. Sure, you can pass on Word macro viruses found in MS Office docs pretty easily, but that's about it. There's not much out there in the PC world these days that embeds itself inside a file that a Mac user might be opening and then passing on to someone else.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/komando/2013/02/14/tech-myths-mac-s oftware-megapixels-camera/1910521/

sophos free home use

http://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-antivirus-for-mac-home-ed ition.aspx

ClamXAV also free from app store

Ive used sophos and no problems, they also have a good forum site

http://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-antivirus-for-mac-home-ed ition.aspx

The false positives are "file errors". There is a setting on the On-Demand Scanner that says to include warnings about files which cannot be scanned. This is checked by default. The false-positives people always talk about tend to be mostly these file errors. Just FYI.

As for passing stuff along, email attachments can also be passed. That's what I was mostly talking about. People will pull down the bogus email and transport it around, then if for some reason that offline copy syncs back up to an Exchange server in an enterprise environment, now that server has a copy of that infected email. It depends upon a lot of factors, but that doesn't detract from the fact that issues like this can happen.

The other side of the coin is that people with Macs that run Windows in Parallels for some reason think they're still immune to the issues at hand. I can't tell you how many VMs I've seen that are infected at the owner has no clue what's going on. Nothing on the Mac side is warning them of anything going on, meanwhile their system is trying to spew out nothing but mass emails. Not running AV on a Mac can be a double-edged sword.

No, I'm not talking about files that can't be scanned, I'm talking about actual false positives.

As for an infection in Windows running in a VM, no amount of virus protection on the Mac can fix that. There has to be anti-virus software running in that Windows system.

Thomas A Reed, a hypothetical question:

If a Bootcamp partition were to be compromised by a virus, would the damage be confined to that partition, or would it spread to the rest of the Mac?

If you have it set up so that the Windows system has access to your Mac partition, then malware in Boot Camp could damage (but not infect) for Mac files. I'm not that familiar with Boot Camp, though, so I don't know how that sort of thing works, and what would and wouldn't be risky.