Do you install antivirus software on Macs in organizational (corporate, education, etc) environments? [closed]

Solution 1:

We do, though it is higher educational institution not a corporate setting. The thought is that even though there is a low risk of a Mac OS X virus outbreak, students still plug their potentially infected flash drives and external hard drives into the machines. Better it is cleaned on a Mac where it can't get infected by a Windows virus than on a PC where it might infect the machine before the AV has a chance to clean it.

Solution 2:

No, we do not use anti-virus software on our macs.

We are a mixed environment: PC/Win + Mac + Linux.

We only install anti-virus s/w on PC/Win machines.

Our macs are running: 9 os x 10.5 ; 1 os x 10.6

We are in a commercial/small business environment with about 10 macs to manage. The owner of the company (my direct manager) does not believe in mac virus software, and has been using exclusively macs for about 20 years.

This is not intended as an argument for or against mac anti-virus software. This response is simply to answer the question who is and who is not running anti-virus software on mac machines.

Solution 3:

We have a few Macs in the art department but run predominantly Windows. At this time only the Windows machines have antivirus software on them.

As an aside, I use a Mac as my main personal machine and only a few days ago installed some AV software for the sole purpose of checking downloaded files, many of which are intended to be installed on Windows machines. I ran a scan of the whole machine and found exactly what I was expecting - nothing.

Personally, I'm having a hard time finding real evidence of a virus for a Mac. That's not to say I don't necessarily believe they exist yet. There are a lot of claims being made, mostly by companies trying to sell AV software, with remarkably little evidence in support of those claims. It reminds me more than a little of the so called Y2K bug, where billions of dollars were spent to "fix" a problem that was non-existent in nearly all but a very tiny number of cases, all of which should have been upgraded at least a decade earlier anyway.

Solution 4:

There's ClamAV on the Macs we have deployed (school environment, mixed PC/Mac) but no real-time scanning.

Windows systems are using Deep Freeze to protect the filesystem (infected? Reboot) and if it's not frozen then yes there is a real-time antivirus on it.

Solution 5:

We have a Mac or two in the office, on them we run the OSX version of Sophos A/V. We don't do real-time scanning on them, however we have them setup to run a nightly scan.