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Virex is a program for Macs which removes viruses and protects from infection.
Virex is available for download, see below.
Yes. The best protectoin against viruses on a Macintosh is to not run any program on it that you are not sure of it's origin and purpose. Macintosh computers are generally not affected by the plethora of viruses and other malicious threates that Windows based computers are vulnerable to. PC trojans and other malware, however, often spread themselves around as e-mail attachments. When an unsuspecting Windows user receives and then opens such an attachment, one of the first thing the trojan will do is scan that user's e-mail address book and start sending itself out to those no it. If you use a Mac and receive a strange attachment or start getting strange emails, even if it is addressed from a friend or collegue, do not download it. Luckily, opening those attachments on a Mac will hav elittle or no effect on your system, but now you will get serveral such emails daily and propogate the malicious program to other, vulnerable, Windows users. If you find that you are getting dozens of these messages a day you may want to look to see if the e-mails or attachments have hte same anme and set up a rule in your e-mail client program to flag or delete them as they arrive.
Turning on any of the sharing services (in System Preferences: Sharing) should not be done unless you know what you are doing and have a specific use in mind. This is especiallyt rue wiht Remote Login and Remote Apple Eevents, both of which could allow an unauthorized user to log into and execute files and services without your knowledge.
Why use Virex? Virex protects against against MS Office viruses. These viruses are generally document specific and only affect the behavior of Office applications, but Virex still should be run.
There are very few known operating system viruses that affect Macintosh computers, and most of those that do exist are designed by anti-virus software companies who specifically engineer the program to prove that such an expolit was possible. Such "proof of concept" viruses, are, of course, not released, they exist merely to show that such viruses are possible. Most viruses on the net are made to affect the operating system with the most users, and Macintoshes comprise a small share of the market.
Furthermore, a Mac virus would be very hard to engineer due to the Mac's architecture. Because Macintosh OS X is based on Unix, it is already by it's nature quite secure. Unix is a permissions based operating system, and most system level functions require "root" privileges. In other words, a virus would have to know your root password and be exectued by an administrative user in order to run. If a Mac virus is engineered, it could do little harm without the express installatoin, execution, and permission of the end user.
Go to http://www.carleton.edu/campus/ITS/resnet/software/
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