San Francisco - After long proclaiming the relative immunity of its Mac computers to viruses and other forms of malware, Apple has begun to quietly recommend that Apple owners install anti-virus software on their computers. The shift was brought to light by the Washington Post, which reported that Apple had place an advisory on its website late last month.
"Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult," said the advisory in the support section of the website.
While Apple's computers have hardly ever been targeted by malware plotters, their growing popularity has increased the threat they face and made them a more popular target. Symantec, which is one of the antivirus vendors recommended by Apple's support page, identified what it claims to be a Mac OS X Trojan kit, that could take over a Mac.
"More and more malware has emerged for Mac OS X recently," Alfredo Pesoli, a security researcher at Symantec, wrote on a company blog last week. "The number of threats for the Mac OS are still small. However, at the moment, it seems as if more malware writers are seeing Mac as a world worthy of exploration."
