Thanks Tacit/ Joe.
What mean windows computer infected, it was my Mac that hot hit no?
It was the site server that got hit either from a bot running on some unwary user's PC somewhere in the world or possibly being knowingly run from someone's computer somewhere in the world such as Russia or China. The odds of your Mac being hit are vanishingly small.
And this Trojan could have come from an intern?
Not sure what you mean by an
intern but by definition trojans have to be intentionally installed by a user of the computer. That means you would have had to download the Trojan's installer and then run the installer. Unless you have a null password you would have needed type in the administrative password to install it and assuming the right settings in Security & Privacy override OS X's reluctance to allow the install by entering your password multiple times. No AV software can protect a user from their own choices. However, as far as I know
no such trojan exists or has ever existed for OS X.
Maybe an email attachment I accidentally opened? Maybe a software someone recommended? I have no idea... Wouldn't AV have prevented this?
I say again, "Antivirus software works by detecting the
signature of
KNOWN viruses. There are no
KNOWN viruses for the Mac. Therefore an AV cannot detect Mac viruses — but it can detect Windows viruses because there are tens of thousands of known Windows viruses and variants.
Windows viruses cannot infect OS X. Therefore AV software would be capable of nothing other than slowing your Mac down and causing a number of annoying problems.
Currently I get zillions of spam with attachments and Sophos is marking some with and error, (thats how Dave at SD explained it), and making some of my super duper clones abort. This is why I posted. What do you guys recommend?
Those messages may be virus infected or they may be false positives. In either case they would be Windows viruses not OS X viruses. I run barefoot so I don't know how Sophos works but typically you can set AV software to move the suspected file to a
Quarantine folder. Once it is there you have several options…
- Exempt the Quarantine folder from SD backups so you should then be able to complete an SD backup.
- Simply delete the suspected file. If it is something you need, contact the originator and ask them to send you a clean copy of the file.
- Most AV softrware will identify the specific virus it has detected. Go to the AV vendors web site and look up the virus and determine if it is a Windows virus or an OS X virus. Then you can make an informed decision on where to go from there (If it is a Windows virus the primary risk is in passing the infected file to a PC user thus earning their animosity, but your Mac is safe
- If the file is sufficiently important and you cannot get a clean copy you may be able to get software from Sophos to disinfect the file that will run on a Mac. Of course that involves more money.
Asking what I/we do is a legitimate question. As I mentioned, I run barefoot — that is without AV software. Occasionally I scan for adware and other not-quite-malware using MalwareBytes anti-Malware. I use a reasonably strong password can actually remember, keep System Preferences ➯ Security & Privacy ➯ Allow apps downloaded from: set to [i]Mac App Store and identified developers[i], avoid sketchy web sites and software aggregators, keep OS X, Java, and Flash rigorously up to date. Keep my ear to the ground for warnings of actual Apple (OS X and iOS) viruses in case one appears and I have to bite the bullet and get antivirus software.
