Around the same time we were bringing you news that Apple had backed off on claims that Macs are immune to viruses, they released a security update for the developer preview of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Developers were alerted to the update yesterday afternoon via email and could download it via the Mac App Store.

The 1.15GB update is includes several new security features. As most developers know, the biggest threat to security on any computer is users who don’t download the latest and most secure versions of software. With this update, the user is removed from the equation. Now Mountain Lion will check for necessary security updates daily, and allows the option to install them automatically or after a restart. It also improves the security around the connections to Apple’s update servers.

This is a fairly minor update to the Mountain Lion developer preview. With the public release of Mountain Lion coming sometime next month Apple appears to be doing some final tweaks to the OS. Two weeks ago at WWDC 2012 Apple promised that Mountain Lion would ship in July, though they declined to offer anything more specific than that. Recently we told you about a third party tech support company that had prohibited employee vacations for the week of July 22-29, suggesting that Mountain Lion would be coming out sometime around then (or shortly before).