Anti-Virus Firms Condemn Apple’s Malware Scanner for Snow Leopard

Anti-virus vendor are slamming Apple for its decision to include an anti-virus component in its new Snow Leopard operating system that was just released on August 28, 2009.

Security firms including Kaspersky Lab, Symantec, McAfee and Intego (which specializes in offerings for the Mac OS) have all been claiming for past several days that Apple's decision of stepping into the field of anti-virus may be wrong.

Aleks Gostev, director of global research, Kaspersky Lab, noted on the firm's Viruslist blog that Leopard's anti-virus scanner might encourage malware authors to develop more malicious software for the Mac OS, reported SCMagazine on August 31, 2009.

Threat researchers at McAfee Avert Labs also agreed that the recent decision of Apple might open floodgates. They said that a number of effects of such a move could be stated, but the most important thing is that Snow Leopard may act as a catalyst for more Mac-targeted malware to be designed.

Despite the immense efforts of Apple to keep the new security features of Snow Leopard under curtains, the news leaked days before the release on a blog site of Mac's security firm Intego, wherein it had posted a screenshot of an application that identified a version of Mac Trojan in a download disk image.

Snow Leopard flaunts anti-virus scanning tools created to tackle an enormous number of malicious trojans and worms targeted at the Mac OS X platform in past few months. Besides, Apple claims that the new anti-malware feature safeguards users from a particular hacking technique known as "sandboxing" by confining users' activities on Mac, restricting their access to files as well as the number of programs they could launch.

Nevertheless, the underlying fact is that the inclusion of malware detection into the Mac OS could certainly provide a launch pad to virus authors.

Moreover, security experts have begun issuing advisories to users about fraudulent free Snow Leopard. Just few days back, Trend Micro advised users to overlook all sites promoting free Snow Leopard upgrades, as in guise of Snow Leopard, they would be served a latest version of the DNS charger Trojan "OSX_JAHLAV.K".

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» SPAMfighter News - 9/18/2009