Best Mac antivirus software
If you own a Mac and are wondering which antivirus software you should choose, or even whether you need antivirus at all, you’ve come to the right place. Over the following pages we reveal the best Mac antivirus software available.
Do Macs need antivirus?
Plenty of Mac aficionados will tell you that Apple computers are inherently secure and don’t require protection. We’d argue that they are wrong – or overconfident, at least. Across 2018, there were 14 new instances of Mac malware, with some finding new and innovative ways to infect their targets.
Macs are generally more secure than their Windows brethren for two reasons. On the technical side, macOS is a Unix-based operating system. As a Unix-based operating system macOS is sandboxed. Sandboxing is like having a series of fire doors: even if malware gains access to your Mac, it is unable to spread to the heart of the machine. Macs are not unhackable, but they are more difficult to exploit than Windows PCs.
Another reason is that there are fewer Macs than there are Windows PCs. Fewer targets, and these are harder to hack. Is it any wonder that cybercriminals focus on the Windows world?
Macs are not entirely safe though, and as they grow in popularity and cybercriminals become smarter and greedier, the risk is increasing. As a result, cybersecurity is more important than ever, and good antivirus software is the best place to start if you want to stay safe.
Selecting an app
Features fundamental to all are two ways for the app to find viruses: on-demand protection, and via always-on protection. The former finds viruses by examining one file after another during scheduled scans, or when you choose to undertake a scan, perhaps because you’re worried you’re infected. The speed at which the anti-malware app can do this is important, because some take a long time and also hog the Mac’s CPU while they do so. Waiting six hours to find out if your Mac is infected is nerve-wracking.
Always-on malware protection is what protects the user outside of the times when scans are run. If some malware arrives on the disk, perhaps via an email or a downloaded file, then the always-on protection should be able to detect it and either quarantine it (copy it to a safe folder so the user can decide what to do with it), or simply delete it. Usually a notification is shown when malware is detected in this way, but not all anti-malware apps show the same amount of explanation of what’s happened – and this was one of the factors we examined in our testing.
Outside of direct malware detection, many anti-malware apps include additional tools such as ransomware protection. Ransomware is a new kind of malware that, once it’s infected a computer, encrypts all the user’s files and then demands a fee to decrypt them. To protect against this infection, anti-ransomware features typically block any app from writing to a user’s home folders, such as Documents or Photos, unless the app’s preapproved (a process called whitelisting). Lots of apps come already preapproved, of course, such as Microsoft Word, or Apple’s own Photos app. But you can add others.
Several anti-malware apps also include virtual private network (VPN) add-ons. These protect an Internet connection by encrypting it, and this is useful when utilizing unsafe open Wi-Fi such
