Does anyone know of an anti-virus (preferably free or cheap) that works well for Mac?

here's why:

Skylar had his personal information stolen recently online. All of the charges were made online. We assumed he had a virus or malware, so he cleaned up his whole computer. He worked out the finance stuff with the bank & closed the card in question. We thought everything was fine, but then this morning, I also had strange charges on my account, so someone has also accessed my personal information & made charges to my Credit Card.

I am afraid since they tried to do things like open new cards in his name & sign up for subscription services.

He is on a PC and I am on a Mac. We are connected to a wireless router (password protected). We do have some other things connected to our router like a laptop, Wii, and PS3. I'm not sure if these might affect security.

Does anyone know good anti-virus for mac, and anything else we might do to protect ourselves (short of getting a new router, which we plan to do now anyway). I'm seriously afraid to turn my computer on at this point.

Are you 100% sure they were stolen online? I only ask because when it happened to me I assumed that but in fact my card had been cloned at a restaurant and then used for online purchases.

Online purchases are of course anonymous so there's no CCTV to catch the perp 'in action' and all you need is a delivery address (legit or not) so they tend to make them, plus you can do it quickly and rack up a lot of debt on the cloned card in a short space of time.

Also - have you replaced a PC or Mac recently? Friend of mine did but failed to properly wipe the harddrive and someone got all his personal details off it.

Anyhow......FreeAVG works on my iMac

I can't really tell how they got it. I think we were both just freaked out that it happened to both of us with a span of 2 weeks.

I suppose though that we also eat at the same places, shop in the same stores, and often do pay with our own cards.

The really strange thing in his case was that everything they bought they sent to us. And it wasn't any large ticket items. it was all "just pay S&H charges" junk

acne medicine, wrinkle creams, vitamins, pills, magazine subscriptions, etc.

I caught mine before any real damage was done, but it seemed to be following this same pattern ($30 charge for something on "PC Tools" and a subscription to the NY Times). I canceled it immediately when I saw those 2.

So strange. Luckily I closed the account & have a new card, but still very scary if they did get it online because surely i'll buy something or pay a bill with the new card.

Very interesting.

I had to close a card two weeks ago for fraudulent charges made by "PC TOOLS."

Perhaps somewhere we all shop at had their cc information compromised.

I have written credit card processing software for point of sale systems used in retail and restaurant locations, and I can tell you that though the laws are much more stringent now on what cc information can and can't be permanently stored on point of sale computers, there are millions of merchants who are using outdated software which permanently save each and every credit card number, expiration date, etc. of every customer who has ever shopped there. And any employee with access to the back office computer, or vendor, or boyfriend of the night manager, can easily cut and paste the info onto a floppy or email or whatever. I can rattle off over a hundred restaurants who have this very setup right now.

Anyhow, odds are somewhere we all shopped have had their cc info compromised, and worse comes to worse we order replacement credit cards. As has been seen here in the past, the cc companies always side with the cardholder. And as far as anti virus software on your mac is concerned, I don't recommend using anything other than a competent router with secure wifi if you use it. Just change your root password every so often and you should be fine. And Free AVG should do the trick for Skylar's PC.

Now whichever shop owner has had their cc info compromised could be in very hot water if investigators ever figure it out. Up to a 10k fine per occurrence can mean going out of business for said merchant. I have witnessed 2 such events myself. It was my job to make sure my software was compliant as I would be the first person sued by the liable shop owner if it were not up to code.

I agree. I wouldn't put any anti-virus software on my mac.

You could try using something like "little snitch" it monitors all in/outs on your computer. It will let you know when any application on your computer is trying to access the internet.

You may already know this, I would make sure you both have active firewalls- they are the main protection besides a secure router against ID theft. Mac should have one built in, as well as XP and Vista. Lately, it seems like more data is stolen from store databases, at Stealthtank points out, than from personal computers.
The Wii and other devices shouldn't be at risk. An FYI for those who don't know; the
WiFI hotspots that Starbucks ,McD's, etc have, are not secure- hackers hang out there just to see what they can steal.
Good luck to you and Skylar; ID thieves are scum.

The "PC Tools" thing gets even odder; in the past 6 months I've had to close two different credit cards, and in both cases they were due to small charges (under $50) made to a company with either that exact name or a very similar one. The strange thing in my case was that one of the cards I hadn't used since early last year, as I've been trying to pay it off. Luckily my CC companies were on the ball and called right away, and I wasn't liable for anything, but it was still pretty startling, as I've never had anything like that happen before. Missy, out of curiosity what type of router are you using? Oh, and I can recommend AVGFree as well; continuously updated and seems to be be pretty efficient.

The "PC Tools" thing gets even odder; in the past 6 months I've had to close two different credit cards, and in both cases they were due to small charges (under $50) made to a company with either that exact name or a very similar one. The strange thing in my case was that one of the cards I hadn't used since early last year, as I've been trying to pay it off. Luckily my CC companies were on the ball and called right away, and I wasn't liable for anything, but it was still pretty startling, as I've never had anything like that happen before. Missy, out of curiosity what type of router are you using? Oh, and I can recommend AVGFree as well; continuously updated and seems to be be pretty efficient.

Here are some links about PC Tools that should be helpful;
It looks like they have been getting a lot of folks.

http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/2 ... 282765.htm

http://www.pctools.com/forum/showthread.php?t=47329

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/archive/ ... 18941.html