MacHome AV for iPad

Question

I cannot find any mention that the free Sophus Mac Home AV is required for iPad, does this AV apply across the whole Mac range including iPad? Thanks. :1002203

Agile · Accepted Answer

As Christian said, iOS running on the iPad (and the iPhone and iPod Touch) is a completely different environment than OS X running on a Mac computer (MacBook, Mac Pro, iMac, Mac Mini) -- different hardware, different software, different environment. Not only will Mac OS X software not run on an iPad, but there is no way to download and install software to the iPad that is not in the App Store (aside from jailbroken iPads, but that is a different discussion). MacHome AV will also not run on MS Windows or Linux operating systems. It does, however, run on older PowerPC-based Macs running OS X 10.4. Since a factory-standard iPad cannot install software other than through the App Store, creating and deploying Trojan software for the iPad (or any iOS device) is much trickier than for an open platform like OS X -- it can be done, but Apple is able to retroactively pull any Trojan software it discovers on the App Store; and an iPad is not usually an always-on-and-connected device, so the benefit to a malware author is less. If you're looking to detect OS X and Windows trojans on an iPad device, there is currently no product that I am aware of that does this. :1002223