POLL: Have you ever gotten a virus on your Mac?

[tuqqer]

Was reading this article on "Does Your Mac Really Need Antivirus software" and while it was slanted by them asking an anti-virus software manufacturer for their advice, it made me wonder how many long-standing Mac users now run antivirus software.

I've always thought and still believe it is deep overkill to run background AV apps, and believe the odds of getting any issues is almost nil. I think most AV users are those that used to be PC users and it's just habit. But I also surprised myself last year when I realized my browser was suddenly pointing its home page to some weird website, no matter now often I changed the default home setting. Crap, I'd downloaded some browser-based malware.

Still, I run my Macs naked, and would be curious what others do.

[cbelt3]

Good 'ol WDEF on my Mac Plus. Resedit found and fixed it.

[NewtonMP2100]

....at the very least.....an STD.....

[Acer]

EDIT: Since say 2010, the answer is "No"

[pdq]

I dunno - is a pop-up in a browser window saying that your “IOS sytem has 3 critical virus” and offering to “fix” it count as browser-base malware?

[rz]

I do not run any AV software and have never gotten any kind of virus. I have not had any malware on my personal machine, but my son's machine apparently had a couple. I ran Malwarebytes on it last year, and it found two pieces of malware. Scans on my machine and my wife's machines showed no malware.

My mother-in-law has gotten quite a few instances of malware. It makes me wonder what websites she visits that cause her to get them.

[JoeH]

Yes, don't recall the names now. A couple were Mac specific, many more were PC viruses that would not have affected my Mac, but useful to remove so I would not pass them on.

I have also seen a number of browser based malware over the years.

[Will Collier]

nVIR, way way back in the System 6 days. 1989 or so.

My dad's iMac contracted a bad case of browser malware (no telling what he installed), but AV wouldn't have stopped that. Took me about five minutes to clean it up.

[Markintosh]

Something pretty trivial about 1991, on my Mac Classic. It arrived on a shareware disk.

[ztirffritz]

The worst that I've encountered was from installing a plugin in Firefox that hijacked the home page and the default search engine. Didn't take me long to figure out the cause. Cleaning it up took a bit longer.