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Is a "threat" to Windows OS a threat to Mac OS too?

ronks69

I have just downloaded the Sophos free Mac home edition, and did a scan of all drives.  Since there were more than 7,000,000 locations, it took some hours to execute.  The result is that I have 103 threats.  When I click on the threat in the Quaranteen Manager, it opens my web browser to bring me to the Sophos page realted to the particular threat.  However, scrolling down, I see in bold title:  Affected Operating Systems:  Windows.  Since I am using the Mac OS 10.5.8 it does not seem to be necessary to delete these "threats" since they can only threaten Windows operating systems.   Yesterday, i called a Mac specialists in my area and he said that none of these threats affect my OS.  It seems illogical and a great waste of time to hunt down and delete a threat that does not affect my computer.  Am I correct to ignore these threats?  

Thanks

Ron

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    Hello Ron,

    this has already been discussed several times in this forum. With the recent appearance of Mac FakeAV you see that the distinction is blurring. Sophos uses the same engine and detection data for all platforms. Scanning is a sophisticated process and doesn't mean that (potential) signatures in a file are compared to a database of millions of entries for a possible match. Thus the distinction whether a particular threat could harm the platform the scanner is running on can only be made when most of the effort has already been done - and it would be more of a waste to not flag the item. This has also the advantage that you can perform "cross-platform" scans without the use of special flags or databases. Last but not least - although some have a different view - it is expedient to prevent passing on malware even if it won't affect you.

    Christian

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    Hi Christian

    thanks for the insight.  I am new to this, as must be clear by my post.  Yes, I do know about the one virus Mac FakeAV , but I appreciate your inclusion here.  Perhaps my saving grace is that I never use cross platform applications.  And I much apprectiate your suggestion that, although these viruses may not affect my Mac OS, I could potentially pass them to another computer that is using Windows.  Thanks again.

    Ron

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    Sorry, maybe not the same question, but arising from the Fake query, I got 14 OSX/FakeAV-DWN attacks in a matter of minutes.  Sophos anti-virus identified them (I am using Mac), but did not give me the option to clean them up.  It says I should do the action manually and then does not allow me to do so. 

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    The wording can be a bit confusing, as it's the same wording used in our enterprise product -- "manual cleanup" means it doesn't happen automatically... you need to initiate the cleanup yourself using a custom scan.  Just add your downloads folder to the custom scan and set it to "delete files" and it should remove everything for you.

    I presume you were doing a Google image search when you started getting the FakeAV alerts?

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