Antivirus Software for the Mac

Hey Guys! I was wondering if you knew of any good AV software for the mac, besides CleanMyMac?

Personally I have never really been a fan of CleanMyMac et al, or the whole AV industry to begin with. Fact is they’re always late to the party. Having a virusscanner can feel like a great way of being secure, but it all starts with not being a fool when you run random pieces of software from dubious sources.

Having said that, the Unix (OSX, like Linux systems, is based on Unix) permission model also comes with a bit of inherit protection against malware. As long as you’re not running as root and only as admin when you need to, it’s already quite sealed up. Additionally, due to the way applications are ran, unix systems are much less suspecible to drive-by infections (although the recent Flashback/Java malware might be considered counterprove).

I’m getting a bit off-topic, though. You wanted to know a few AV’s for the Mac. I found this article at mac.appstorm that lists and compares a few (and discusses the need). Reading the comments might be worthwhile as well, as there’s a few valuable discussions going on there.

What I do recommend, though, is Little Snitch – this nifty little tool monitors all outgoing connections, allowing you to spot a malicious process phoning home. I guess it does require some basic understanding of what to trust and what not to trust (i.e. system processes), but a bit of Google goes a long way when you’re in doubt. Envato’s mac.appstorm wrote a commentary on LS a while ago.

EDIT : For the record; this is my personal opinion and has nothing to do with Envato

Like Joost, I run Little Snitch to monitor connections

I am actually looking for something that will clean and speed up my system, any suggestions?

My main tool for that is Clean my Mac.

I also use Clean my Drive, Daisy Disk (for seeing what is using the most space), AppZapper for deleting apps properly and iFreeMem

ShermanJackson said
I am actually looking for something that will clean and speed up my system, any suggestions?

Ah, but that’s entirely unrelated to antivirus software, though Granted, a virus might cause your system to slow down, but that’s highly unlikely to be the cause.

ElliotJackson already mentioned several of the popular ones. Personally, I’ve used Onyx in the past – I’m a bit sceptical about the actual net results, though.

CleanMyMac for manual cleaning not anti-virus
Sophos as anti-verus that works well for me no worries.

Forgot about Onyx as I have never really used it. Lots of people have nice things to say about it though.

Thanks guys, I will give all a try and figure out which one is good for me

Remember to let us know if you find anything good