MS would say "Do you have a retail or OEM product?"

Canonical would say "Have you bought a support package?"

If something goes wrong with their device, first stop for customers is usually the manufacturer be that HP or Apple. Since Apple make both the hardware and OS, they're going to encounter both types of support query.

HP would say "Use the restore function. If you've deleted it, you can download the re-installation discs from our website. Then recover your data from your backups."

And from the sounds of it, despite the 'official' line from HQ, that's more or less what most of the Apple support staff will suggest.
Roll it back via Time Machine, I'd imagine, or something else.

I'd argue with that. For the majority, the first stop would be the place they bought it. That could also be Apple in their particular example of course. In either case, Apple simply disavowing knowledge of the issue is just wrong. It's legally valid, although a bit horrible, to say 'you screwed it up, it's not part of the warranty, we won't fix it for you' but to actually lie to customers is never acceptable.

Jon

Apple official knowledge base article, eventually.

Seems to be the current habit with Apple - dunno if their corporate cogs are just inert but they seem to be very slow off the mark with things recently.

Jon

Nice.

+1 Not everyone is capable of making their machines secure. Though Apple should make users set up admin and user accounts to protect themselves as much as possible.

Microsoft actually have a freephone number (at least in America) for dealing with the removal of malware from their products.

The article is incorrect (IIRC) in at least one important respect - if you're Mac is vaguely up to date with security updates, 'open safe files after downloading' is switched off by default. That happened.. gosh, quite a while ago now. The new variant will only function as described if you've specifically gone in and switched it back on again. Which all the Apple security advisories very clearly tell you not to do.
Also, given Apple's security update isn't live yet, I don't see how this person can state categorically that this new variant will be able to defeat that when it arrives.

It's not very good journalism, I'm afraid.

Jon

Apple is pushing out a fix soon, but a new variant called Mac Guard can apparently install itself without a password being rerquired.



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13560137

The advice is the same as before - turning off Open Safe Files Automatically in Safari stops it doing this.