Gatekeeper is a program designed to continuously monitor the operation
of your Macintosh, watching for operations that are commonly carried
out by viruses as they attempt to spread. When Gatekeeper detects an
infection attempt it will automatically stop the attempt, almost
before it's started.
This type of monitoring and protection is possible because viruses
generally depend on a small group of operations which they use in
somewhat unusual ways. Of course, if detecting virus operations was
really as straightforward as all that, everyone would be doing it. The
fact is there's a catch. Not a big one, but a catch just the same:
Some perfectly normal programs carry out some of the same basic
operations
that viruses do. (For very different reasons, of course.)
Gatekeeper deals with these "false-alarms" by allowing you to tell it
what virus-like operations any given program should be allowed to
carry out. You tell Gatekeeper just once, then forget about it -
everything's automatic from then on.
