Q: A Recent Mac Virus Warning!

this is a developed attack that will allow this. It was created by a developer exposing the problem and he also released a free piece of softare to notify you if someone else actually created an identical hack and enabled it in you computer. but this is not an actually "attack in the wild" and running Sophos on the mac is about as safe as shooting a horse so it wont walk out of the barn. The forums are riddled with mac users who installed an AV only to have created major problems, and sift though false information. The state of Mac AV at this time is they cause far more problems then they purport to fix.

https://www.virusbulletin.com/conference/vb2016/abstracts/last-minute-paper-gett ing-duped-piggybacking-webcam-streams-su…

the best preventive measure is to do what Mark Zuckerberg does and cover the camera with a piece of back tape because it's compatible with every camera, OS update and uses no system resources.

JimmyCMPIT wrote:

 

...and running Sophos on the mac is about as safe as shooting a horse so it wont walk out of the barn. The forums are riddled with mac users who installed an AV only to have created major problems, and sift though false information.

Just a comment on this. There is definitely A-V to avoid, but I have been running Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition (vs. the cloud edition, Sophos Home for Mac) for any number of years now with ZERO adverse effects. No false positives, or any slowdowns of any significance. Not only that, there may not be much in the way of OS X trojans around now, but one very good reason for having it is that Sophos will flag and quarantine any known (known to Sophos) adware installers--much more of a threat to Macs than typical malware these days-- as soon as they are opened. It will stop them dead in their tracks before they can be installed (I've tested this on my own system.)

Unfortunately, most people here at ASC (many of whom have no direct knowledge of what they're talking about and are only ignorantly echoing each other) like to paint all A-V with a very broad brush.

And some of us get to test these products out for use in corporations who have deployed mac systems to entire departments and we report back to the ISO groups we coordinate with providing case studies of how they affected productivity.

JimmyCMPIT wrote:

 

And some of us get to test these products out for use in corporations who have deployed mac systems to entire departments and we report back to the ISO groups we coordinate with providing case studies of how they affected productivity.

And, so?

and so I end up testing these products deployed to multiple users, to their workflows to their pipelines so I get to see how the software behaves on dozens of systems that have specific functions,  and how each user is effected, but I'm thinking that does not qualify to meet your "direct knowledge of what their talking about" regardless, especially when you support your argument with "And, so?"

You have your opinion which your entitled to, but opinion does not automatically become fact because someone has one.

This "virus" was a proof of concept by developed by a securities lab, their job to expose possible exploits and provide the developers of the OS with this information so the developers may try to close the gaps that allow this. As for it's existence it may or may not exist as code but even if it does it does not exist on the internet, at least at this time.

In the mean time you can force your system to use the line in which is not a viable recording device.

1. Launch the System Preferences.
2. Click on “Sound”
3. Click on the “Input” tab.
4. Select “Line-in”
5. Close System Preferences

JimmyCMPIT wrote:

 

and so I end up testing these products deployed to multiple users, to their workflows to their pipelines so I get to see how the software behaves on dozens of systems that have specific functions,  and how each user is effected, but I'm thinking that does not qualify to meet your "direct knowledge of what their talking about" regardless, especially when you support your argument with "And, so?"

 

You have your opinion which your entitled to, but opinion does not automatically become fact because someone has one.

You are talking in generalities. My "and so?" was meant to ask you to provide direct evidence from your own experience of Sophos A-V for Mac Home Edition, or even Sophos Home (which happens to be the A-V discussed by the OP, as well as myself), which would never be employed in a corporate environment. As such, your comment, "The state of Mac AV at this time is they cause far more problems then they purport to fix," while it may be true for some A-V is, for the purposes of this discussion, an over-generalization, misleading, and irrelevant.

I have been using Sophos for Mac Free Edition since it came out with no problems at all. Sophos uses very little system resources. Occasionally I run a Sophos scan on susceptible folders (I also run AntiMalware bytes), comes back with a clean report. To suggest that Macs are not vulnerable to Malware attack, IMHO, as not much of a techie, is to ignore the increasing threats on the internet. Sophos is not some "fly by night" company, highly thought of. Their main focus is Enterprise virus solutions. I am just thankful that they are willing to give the regular Mac user a way to protect our computers,

Sophos may be "highly thought of" but how many developers does Sophos have in their organization that have that have the same degree of Mac programming as they do Windows? How many developers are dedicated to either platform? How many years have they been developing for windows in comparison to mac? How many windows virus variants have they encountered in that time and how many mac virus variants since they began development?  How far along are they with cooperating with Apple as they have with Windows on the integration of their product with the OS? Does Apple even coordinate with them or any Mac AV developer and discuss what they wont even disclose in their security patch knowledge bases which Microsoft does routinely.

Also, in no way did I ever state there are no malware or adware attacks that affect mac, there are, but the numbers are clearly no where near the variants for windows and while a mac virus could appear in the wild at any time, none have been discovered by any securities lab and no Mac AV has ever faced a real one yet.

BTW I was recently asked by the corporation I coordinate with to investigate an issue that caused a department of Mac users running OS 10.9.5 in an active directory environment to perpetually disconnect from their network.

The problem was traced back local installs of Sophos AV in all events.