Sophos recommends Macs for home users - Topsight recomends security essentials

Today various news sources reported that Antivirus and computer security company Sophos is telling its users to dump pc's and get macs.

From: http://www.tgdaily.com/

"Computer users tired of spyware and viruses should consider switching to Macintosh computers, says Sophos in its new "Security Threat Management Report." The report ranks the top ten malware threats of the past six months along with outline current and future security threats. Hacker primarily target Windows machines and the report claims the Macintosh will continue to be a "safer place," at least for a while."?

This is bad advise any way you look at it. Consumers shouldn't be spending more money on anouther product they know very little about, home users should be spending more time learning about these threats and how to combat them.

Combating these threats on the PC may eventully be very similar to doing so on the mac platform. There is no built in 100% safe guard in the mac platform that prevents it from being attacked by viruses and malware.

The bottom line, whether you use a mac or a pc, you should be using a firewall, you should be checking for updates at least weekly, and you should know the security basics of your operating system, the same can be said for linux. Using an alternate operating system doesn't increase security, it actully decreases it because new users are less likely to know how to secure it.

Related information for securing windows XP:
Microsoft 6 steps to help secure your brand-new PC
Security Essentials for Windows XP without Service Pack 2