Security firms lag behind at the launch of Snow Leopard

Apple has placed Symantec's Norton AntiVirus and McAfee VirusScan on the list of programs that are incompatible with Snow Leopard. This may not be such a hard blow, as many Apple fans are proud that they can make do without anti-virus software to slow them down. That the two major AV vendors are taking their time does indicate they don't consider the situation all that urgent. In addition, Apple has provided Snow Leopard with basic trojan protection, and the free ClamAV anti-virus protection worked fine in our first tests.

However, it is a truly bitter pill for the users of the PGP Desktop encryption software, who find themselves confronted with a recommendation by the vendor to undo their entire hard disk encryption before migrating to Mac OS 10.6. Apparently, only the next version of PGP Desktop will support Apple's current operating system.

Small comfort that emails, for instance, can be encrypted with the free GnuPG, (tested with Thunderbird and EnigMail, GPGMail for Apple's Mail.app does not work yet) and that the FileVault feature of Mac OS X enables users to encrypt their home directories. Many companies have set up strict guidelines stipulating that a company notebook's entire hard disk has to be encrypted for security reasons. Unlike a virus threat, the risk that a laptop – and all the data stored on it – could get stolen is just as high for a Mac laptop as it is for a Windows laptop.

(djwm)