In an unfortunate case of what was probably over-zealousness on the part of an Apple employee, Apple posted and then quickly removed a confusing Knowledge Base article regarding use of anti-virus software on Mac OS X. The article, previously available at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2550 began as follows:

1. Mac OS: Antivirus utilities
   

2. Last Modified: December 02, 2008
   

3. Article: HT2550
   

4. Old Article: 4454
   

5. Summary
   

6. Learn about antivirus utilities available for the Mac OS.
   

7. Products Affected
   

8. Consumer Software, Mac OS
   

9. 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. Here are some available antivirus utilities:
   

The BBC quotes an Apple spokesman as saying that advice was “inaccurate” and "The Mac is designed with built-in technologies that provide protection against malicious software and security threats right out of the box.”

It seems the media and PR storm caused by Apple’s “admitting” viruses were a potential threat, especially in light of certain anti-PC ads, may have had something to do with the article’s disappearance. That’s too bad in a way, although the article’s encouragement to use “multiple” anti-virus utilities was quite confusing, because that can’t be done on a single Mac (the advice was likely intended to be a statement to be applied across the Mac community as a whole, and is quite accurate in that regard).