Can anybody recommend an anti-virus for my macbook pro

Question

Can anybody recommend an anti-virus for my macbook pro
I have started to get attachments to my fsmail account from known sites but when opened I'm greeted by a a sentence in French that has the words orange and virus in it. Unfortunately I cannot speak French so are unsure what it is. I believe that my email and possibly my computer has been attacked?
Any views recommendations would be most welcome.
Trevor

Answer 1

This forum is for questions about the Communities themselves. You'll usually be more likely to get a quick and helpful answer if you post in the  forum dedicated for your product. Anyway, my standard antivirus spiel:
At this time there have been no confirmed Mac OS X viruses (subject to the semantic debate about whether the old iChat exploit, now long since blocked, was properly classified as a virus or a trojan horse, and not counting the Word macro virus that can affect Office v.X or non-updated copies of Office 2004), very few trojans and no adware or spyware. I therefore do not feel that antivirus or antispyware software is necessary at this time as long as users are careful about what they download from the Internet or accept as attachments via email.
The most common exploit is a recent outbreak of "scareware" that people are encountering while web surfing. This "scareware" pops up and claims that your system is infected with viruses, prompts you to download their "scanner", then tells you that you need to purchase their paid software to remove them. These fake applications, appearing by many names including Mac Defender, Apple Security Center, Apple Web Security, and many others, do nothing at all other than turn off the fake warnings once they have your money. DO NOT fall for these.
Security precautions for Mac OS X mostly are common sense: don't download and run files from sites you don't know, don't fall for any "you have viruses" messages, don't double-click on attachments in emails you aren't expecting and/or from people you don't know, and make sure you password your system with a non-trivial password and keep that password secure. In addition, don't leave your system available in a public place and unattended where someone unauthorized could use it and potentially install malware (such a policy is also a precaution against theft).
It is possible for a Mac user to inadvertently forward a Windows virus to a PC user though you'd have to do it manually so the above precautions would probably prevent such virus-spreading, and said Windows virus cannot infect the Mac.
If you do decide you wish to run antivirus software, I think that the donationware clamXav should be more than enough. iAntivirus has also been recommended by others, though I have no personal experience with it.
If you are running Windows on your system, either via BootCamp, Parallels Workstation or another solution, then that copy of Windows is subject to all the myriad exploits common to the Windows world, so you need to take full precautions, including running both antivirus and antispyware software.
Regards.
Message was edited by: Dave Sawyer