Virex and Tiger and Stuffit

Bill Thompson of the BBC’s Go Digital blogged recently that Macs are just as vunerable as PCs to security issues. It generated quite some feedback. Well, he’s right. I just discovered a virus on our Macs. The virus we had was in MS Word documents - this is a MS Office feature taking advantage of Visual Basic for Applications rather than a Mac OS X issue. However, if you exchange Word documents (or any MS Office file on any platform) you really should be scanning before opening. We used to have Virex installed on our Macs but I got rid of it because it seemed to slow the machines down and had no virus discoveries for several years. Of course, as soon as you let your guard down you get infected. 

Virex 7.7 is compatible with Tiger. It is available as a trial download from McAfee. I installed it on five Macs - the fifth Mac crashed constantly during scans. The crash log showed it was crashing in the Stuffit SDK - this is the SDK that Virex uses to uncompress archive files so that it can scan inside. The fix for this is to download and install the latest Stuffit Standard from Allume. This updates the Stuffit Framework (/Library/Frameworks). On a reboot the scan worked fine.