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My conclusion? 3rd party anti-malware software on the Mac is unnecessary and as Ari Trachtenberg noted, can cause more problems that it solves.

So, I have a very good historical view of Apple ecosystem malware security. I worked for Apple Tech support from 1992-2001 and have been an Apple developer since. This is a little long but this exact argument has been rehashed for the last 14 years. Third party AV software does have some (limited) utility in protecting non-Mac systems from infected files sourced from other non-Mac systems (sharing documents, etc.) Apple keeps these up to date, and is generally good about patching known security issues quickly.

More, Apple has its own security features, Xprotect and Gatekeeper, which do a good job of identifying and preventing known and potential malware from executing on your system. Some third party Mac AV packages didn't recognize well documented Flashback variants for more than a year after it first hit.

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This is a poor showing - we only seeĭozens of Mac malware variants per year, compared to 65,000 per dayĭespite Flashback being used as a call to arms to encourage people toĪdopt antivirus tools, most of those tools failed to detect Flashbackįor weeks - until it was highly publicized.ĪV Vendors make a number of dubious claims with little real-world verification if a widespread 'zero day' attack did hit, there is no reason to expect third party software, which relies on signature databases, to be able to identify and stop it. Reed, even the best Mac malware tool detected only 90 percent of the Rich Mogull on the Mac TidBITS blog explains:įar less malware exists for Macs, but even there we see limitedĮffectiveness across tools. There is no clear evidence that third party anti-malware security software (AV software) is more effective than Apple's own security solutions to protect Macs.

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If your version of Mac OS X has that, you already have anti-virus protection and I wouldn't recommend getting another one.) (Note that this includes Apple's own File Quarantine system. In most cases, normal users are better off running some brand of antivirus. Even without malware to exploit flaws, anti-virus flaws can still cause problems on your computer. Both signatures and heuristics have their flaws (false positives and false negatives) and in some cases the antivirus software itself contains flaws that the malware can exploit.

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Many malware authors are creating cross-architecture payloads and targeting multiple vulnerabilities now because ignoring that portion of potential victims that don't use Windows is leaving money on the table. Native Mac malware is rare but is getting less so all the time. The key point here is that even malware that doesn't affect your Mac can still affect your life and/or business. The computers were spread from Cairns to Adelaide and there were only three of us in the IT department.

It didn't affect us until we sent it to the government. Of course, that didn't work on a Mac so we were unaware that we even had the virus. On a Windows machine, the virus in question also attempted to deleted the C: drive. Shortly, we found that we couldn't submit the Word documents to the government agency responsible for paying us because they were rejected at their email gateway. As files were shared around, more and more computers were infected. As well as documents, it could infect the preferences file and after that, any Word document you opened up on that same computer. It executed only within Microsoft Word but the macro language is the same across Windows and Mac computers so it ran just fine. Someone managed to bring a Word macro virus into the system. We were essentially a government contractor and, as such, nearly all our money came from sending Microsoft Word documents to the government to document what we had done and what we should be paid for. Back in 2003, I was working in tech support for a Mac-based organisation.