View this article at: http://www.macnn.com/articles/08/07/22/pc.tools.iantivirus/
Tuesday, Jul 22, 2008 12:05am
First Look: PC Tools iAntiVirus
Anyone who has used a Windows PC knows that you absolutely must have an anti-virus program or else your computer will likely crash the moment you connect to the Internet. Fortunately, the Mac has remained largely untouched by the variety of malware (viruses, worms, Trojan Horses, and spyware) that plagues PCs. However, with the growing popularity of the Mac, it’s inevitable that more people will start writing malware for the Mac. Although you don’t need an anti-virus program for the Mac just yet, you might feel safer knowing that a free one exists called PC Tools iAntiVirus.

The biggest distinction between this program and rival anti-virus programs for the Mac, such as Norton AntiVirus, is the size of its database. Nearly all antivirus programs contain a database of known viruses and other malware threats. Each time an antivirus program scans a file, it checks its database to determine if it recognizes a virus embedded in the file.

An antivirus program is only as effective as its database, which is why you must constantly update this antivirus database. Since few malware programs threaten the Mac, most Mac antivirus programs pad their database full of Windows virus information. This lets the antivirus program boast that it can find and recognize thousands of viruses. What these antivirus programs fail to tell you is that the majority of the viruses it can catch run only on Windows, which can never harm your Mac in the first place.

What makes this program’s database different is that it only contains Mac-specific malware threats. Despite the scarcity of such threats, there are several dozen malware programs that target the Mac although most of these programs are “proof of concept” programs or only capable of infecting and running on the old Mac OS 9 operating system.