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There is nothing inherently insecure about your computer responding to a ping.  Indeed it can actually be a helpful sanity check if you're trying to diagnose network problems.

I would likewise not worry too much about stealthing your Mac.  The difference between stealthed and closed is that if a port is closed, your computer will actively refuse incoming connections whereas if it is stealthed it will just ignore them.  Stealthing is security through obscurity and really in your case not a huge concern.

I agree with roo and daniel. It's probably your router and there is no danger.

Graham wrote:

What type of a virus scan do most people run on there mac? Any other suggestions to help with viruses, spy ware and such?

I don't do smurf for protection on ANY of my Macs. Never have. I download gobs or random unknown files and visit an unhealthy share of shady websites without ANY issues. No viruses, no spyware, no nothin. When someone makes a real virus for OS X I'll start worrying about it. For now, I just run regular backups because a hardware failure is far more likely than anything else.

Last edited by pottymouth (2007-07-24 12:56 pm)

I agree with everyone else: it's your router which is responding, not your Mac.

Check out the Security Now podcasts. All of the episodes are available at this link (Security Now is also found on iTunes, but it only has the last 25 episodes available there). You might start with episode 25 and go through to episode 47 (for now skipping the listerner Q&A episodes which are those divisible by 4) to get a general overview of Internet security. The focus of Security Now is mostly on Windows, but there is lots of info for computers in general. Part of the reason why I mention Security Now is the router vs. computer responding is explained here among those episodes above.

As of yet there are no viruses which can affect Macs. Apple is fairly proactive in updating their software with security fixes so you should make sure that you have downloaded and installed all of the latest fixes from Apple. This can be done fairly easily by running Software Update (Apple). If you would rather keep track of this yourself or download the software for later installation, you can find the latest downloads from Apple here.

If you have to communicate with a lot of people who use PCs like I do, you might install an anti-virus program in order to detect when something bad is sent by them to you so you don't wind up passing problems along to other PC users. For this you might consider using ClamXav (VersionTracker link, freeware).

EDIT: added info on Security Now.

Last edited by D'Eyncourt (2007-07-24 2:37 pm)

There is no reason to add some sort of virus scanner on a mac.  I have my firewall turned on for good measure though.  Firewall settings can be found in System Prefrences, in the sharing pane.

I keep it simple.    Copy my backups to a Firewire disk. 

I made an Automator script to help me do the main stuff.    In addition to copying your iTunes music, photos, documents, I also copy many parts of the home folder / Library folder.

Not to mention you'll probably need it for Time Machine in 10.5.

NAG wrote:

Not to mention you'll probably need it for Time Machine in 10.5.

Yeah.  Been running 10.5 since WWDC.  I use Time Machine.  Its great, Leopard installer also gives you the option to restore your system from a Time Machine archive.

Look up your specific model. My G5 iSight iMac maxes at 2 GB, the latest are up to 4 GB, I think, maybe more.