"Apple is positioning this more as anti-malware defense-enhancing default security, not anti-virus," says Chet Wisniewski, security analyst at Sophos. The function is intended to defend against two common Trojan attacks that could hit users not using anti-virus software, he says.
While Snow Leopard does have the ability to update this feature to defend against more types of malware, Apple is informing traditional anti-virus vendors that it won't compete in full-fledged anti-virus defense, Wisniewski says.
"This is ," Wisniewski says. "What they're doing is pattern-matching for two well-known Trojans, including one that pretends to be a video player." (Sophos' analysis of the Apple Snow Leopard anti-malware defense .)
Wisniewski adds that Apple has historically had much less of a problem with malware attacks than Windows; the Macintosh today is subject to a few hundred types of computer viruses while Windows operating systems have been targeted by over 22 million virus specimens, he says.