TechPulse 360

Kaspersky Lab confirms launch of anti-malware product for Mac by year-end

As the urban legend goes, Macs are just less vulnerable to viruses, malware and other various cyber attacks that usually plague Windows users.

And in large part, the status quo is mostly respected with some notorious exceptions however; like Apple recommending to run an antivirus software (from Intego, McAfee or Symantec) last November (Apple erased the note from its site a few days later), the “exploit” against Safari last March or the latest Mac OS X release that patches several vulnerabilities found in the Apple operating system.

MacOS X has a lot of vulnerabilities: FUD or not?

Should that make me feel less secure while working on my MacBook? Not really; which made Kaspersky Lab marketing manager Peter Beardmore grin when we met last week while touring Silicon Valley.

“The Mac today is far more vulnerable than people think it is. Percentage-wise a lot of Macs are not protected at all, meaning there’s an inherent vulnerability associated with that… The vulnerabilities are there and we can cite chapter and verse if you’re interested but there’s a lot of vulnerabilities out there,” said Beardmore.

Beardmore confirmed that Kaspersky will release a Mac version of its security suite later this year. So his remarks have been taken with a grain of salt as it’s hard to know if this is to build up the scare prior to the product launch or an actually real concern.

Follows a video excerpt of our conversation with Beardmore on the future Mac product. More on Kaspersky plans in later posts.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 8:41 pm and is filed under Interviews, news, software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.