Antivirus software

McAfee VirusScan antivirus software for Macintosh computers is available at no additional cost to members of the RIT community, for both Institute and home use.

You may download appropriate antivirus software from the links below:

• VirusScan 8.6 is the latest version. It requires Mac OS X Tiger (10.4.6 or later) or Mac OS X Leopard (10.5 or later), and is universal to support Macs with either PowerPC and Intel processors. It additionally requires at least 512 MB of RAM and 45 MB of free disk space on your system. Download VirusScan 8.6 for Mac OS X here.
  

  If you want to verify checksums on this download, it has MD5 and SHA-1 hashes as listed below:

  • MD5: 5231aee89d5fade55165a8aa58b10edb
  • SHA1: 9d450e6d7dc499a045b48d9713e6775cb304b64a
• VirusScan 8.5 is an older version that we previously distributed. However, it is no longer available; you should use VirusScan 8.6 on Tiger and Leopard systems instead.
• Virex, an older version, is available for Mac OS X 10.3 systems, as well as classic Mac OS. Download these versions of Virex from our Virex page.

Notes

VirusScan 8.6 requires Mac OS X 10.4.6 or later, and cannot be installed on Macs that are not running Tiger or Leopard.

In our testing, installation of VirusScan 8.6 has not required a restart of your computer.

VirusScan 8.6 has the option to scan on “write” or “read and write.” For the most performance (with a tradeoff in risk), choose the “write” option. The default when installed is to scan on “read and write.” If you are not installing the product in Mac OS X’s graphical interface, you will not see the choice between “write” and “read and write.”

Malware warnings from VirusScan may be for suspicious files that do not directly impact Mac OS X systems. For broad protection, VirusScan shares antivirus definitions with McAfee’s products on multiple platforms.

The VirusScan Reporter window may appear (and re-appear continuously) when viruses or other malware are detected. This has occurred most often in our testing when scanning the local mail cache stored by Apple Mail. We are investigating why VirusScan Reporter loops in this way, and hope to find a method to dismiss its warnings. If you see this problem, please contact us.

If you are distributing VirusScan 8.6 to managed computers, you should be aware that the product installer (not VirusScan itself) creates a group named “Virex” in the local Mac OS X directory service. If you are not running the installer on managed computers, we suggest creating this group on those computers before you install VirusScan. When doing this, you can choose the GID for the group; otherwise, it will typically assume GID 500.

The VirusScan 8.6 installer additionally creates two files that are required for the software to run. If they are not present, the application may act as a demo, and it can expire and no longer run. Systems administrators who are deploying VirusScan 8.6 through means other than the supplied Apple Installer package should be aware of this behavior. The two files are:

• /Library/Preferences/.com.Mcafee.VirusScan.install
• /Library/Preferences/com.Mcafee.VirusScan.plist