Best Mac Antivirus

Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac

Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac's top-shelf malware detection and barely there system impact make it the best antivirus solution.

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Avast Free Mac Security

Jun 07, 2018 You may not need a firewall, but you do need a VPN. And there's no need to pay for a firewall. ZoneAlarm Free Firewall retains its title as Editors' Choice for free personal firewall. Free Antivirus 2018 License key + Activation Code For [ Windows + MAC ] services and products Free Antivirus 2018 License key + Activation Code For [ Windows + MAC ] is a household that of security applications developed by Avast Software for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. If you’re a new Mac user (or even if you’re not), you might be confused about what kind of security software you do and don’t need. The truth is, for most people, OS X is fairly secure out of the box. And there are a number of programs out there that potentially do more harm than good.

Avast Free Mac Security's malware-squashing proficiency, negligible performance impact and included password manager make it the best free option.

Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac

Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac offers top-shelf malware detection and protects files from ransomware.

After evaluating eight free and paid antivirus products, we've chosen Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac ($40 per year) as the best antivirus for Mac. It had a nearly invisible impact on system performance, and it caught all malware.

/avast-get-assistance-for-mac/. Avast Free Mac Security is our favorite free option, as it provided nearly perfect malware protection and an easy-to-use interface with an imperceptible performance hit.

Free Firewall For Mac

You do need an antivirus program on your Mac. Recent years have seen more Mac malware and adware than ever before, from Trojans to targeted attacks, supply-chain attacks like the XcodeGhost attack and even encrypting ransomware.

MORE: Best Antivirus Software and Apps

Latest Security Alerts and Threats

— Google pushed out an emergency patch for its Chrome browser for Windows, macOS and Linux after a vulnerability was found that could let a malicious website take over a computer. ADVICE: Copy and paste 'chrome://settings/help' into your Chrome address bar to make sure your browser is updated to version 76.0.3809.132.

— Apple patched a security hole that let you -- or a malicious website -- jailbreak an iPhone and install any kind of app, including potential malware. (This is not among the flaws that let several websites infect any iPhone.) ADVICE: Make sure your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch is updated to iOS 12.4.1.

— Spammers have been sending emails to inject scam or malicious messages in regular people's Google Calendar pages. ADVICE: Follow our instructions to stop phony Google Calendar notifications from happening to you.

How We Tested

/avira-vs-avast-antivirus-for-mac/. To find the best antivirus for Mac desktops and laptops, we evaluate ease of use, interface and performance impact, we installed each AV program on the same Late 2013 MacBook Pro with Retina Display running macOS 10.12 Sierra. It was powered by a 2.6-GHz Intel Core i7 processor and had 8GB of RAM and 70GB of data stored on a 512GB SSD.

We conducted our own tests in July and August 2017 based on how much each antivirus product affected our laptop's performance. To do this, we used our custom OpenOffice benchmark, which matches 20,000 names and addresses in a spreadsheet. We measured how long it took to run a quick scan and a full scan while the laptop crunched numbers in the background.

We assessed how easy each program was to use and the number of useful extra features it offered (including free add-on software). To gauge how effective each package was at stopping malware, we used the results of evaluations conducted in May 2017 by AV-TEST, a well-regarded independent product-testing lab in Germany, and results from other tests conducted in July 2017 by AV-Comparatives, a similarly well-respected firm in Austria.

Best Mac Antivirus

Reasons to Buy

Kaspersky Internet Security is the best antivirus for Macs because it offers both the lowest system impact and some of the best malware-detection rates recorded. It even provides extra security features, including parental controls and options to lock down your webcam and stop websites from tracking your browsing activity. If you're willing to pay to protect your Mac from malware, Kaspersky Internet Security is the best option available.

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Best Free Mac Antivirus

Reasons to Buy

Avast Free Mac Security caught 99.9 percent of all malware, packs in a password manager, barely leaves a smudge on system impact and doesn't charge a dime. If only it caught 100 percent of malware, as Kaspersky did.

Reasons to Buy

Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac is one of only a few solutions we tested that offers perfect malware detection. Further, its modern, streamlined interface places on-demand scans front and center. Bitdefender has dropped from first place, though, because its system-impact scores don't match the flawless marks posted by Kaspersky.

Reasons to Avoid

Norton 360 Deluxe may offer excellent protection, but it charges more (after the first year) than its competitors do, without offering as many perks. Norton AntiVirus Plus offers similar protection for a single Mac, but with fewer perks. Still, both have always-on-call customer support.

Do I Need A Firewall With Free Avast

Reasons to Buy

Reasons to Avoid

If you're looking for the best antivirus for Mac without having to pay, AVG AntiVirus for Mac is not too shabby, with its 99.9 percent detection rate and easy-to-use design. Unfortunately, other free competitors provide extras (Sophos with parental controls, Avast's password manager) that AVG does not.

Best for Families

Reasons to Buy

With Sophos Home for Mac's simple interface and low system-performance impact, you'll barely realize the program is shielding you until you need it. Anyone with young children at home will find Sophos' parental controls useful, as they allow for remote scans and checks, and let you block sites by category. Sophos even keeps a log of when users try to reach banned pages. This program's major drawback, though, is its lackluster malware-detection rate.

Reasons to Buy

Free Firewall For My Computer

Once our favorite, Avira Free Antivirus for Mac is no longer the best antivirus for Mac. That's because it is a hair shy of perfection in its malware detection, and fell behind in system-performance testing, earning some of the higher performance impacts recorded.

Reasons to Buy

Reasons to Avoid

Firewall Software For Mac

While McAfee's unlimited licenses mean you can support a whole family of Macs (and PCs and Android devices, too), this program's lack of special features (for a paid version) make it hard to recommend. Further, we don't have malware-detection testing scores for McAfee, so its protection powers are unproven.

I love free software, and like most of you, I hate paying subscription fees. So, I was very excited to find out another free antivirus for Mac – Sophos Home and decided to test whether it’s a good alternative to other well-known solutions.

I installed the app on my MacBook, tested it on my favorite malware samples, and below is my Sophos Home Free program review.

While one can use Sophos Home antivirus for free on Mac, the free software is significantly limited in useful features. Considering the below-average malware detection on macOS, at about 70% rate, compared to other free antiviruses, it’s worth going with other antimalware products.

Honestly, I was kinda surprised with my findings, so let me walk you through the good and bad stuff.

I will start with good things first.

How to install Sophos on Mac

Compared to other free antiviruses, it is relatively easy to install Sophos on Mac.

First, google “sophos free for Mac” and go to their website.

On the main page, click on the “Download now” button under “Sophos Home Free.” Don’t download Premium. The free version comes as a trial of the Premium, so if you end up liking the product, you can always upgrade later.

Start Sophos Installer from the Downloads folder.

Follow installer wizard instructions, i.e., click on Next and Install buttons as appropriate. The app will ask for the admin password to install a helper tool. It’s alright; you can enter it. Almost all antivirus productions ask for a password when installing.

One other thing you have to do manually is open Security Preferences and click on the padlock in the bottom left corner in order to proceed with configuration and enter your password again.

In the “Allow apps downloaded from:” section click on Unblock button. You have to jump through all these hoops because the internal Mac security (Gatekeeper and XProtect) is designed to keep you from installing malware from the internet.

Now, in the same System Preferences panel, click on the Privacy tab.

Scroll down and click on the Full Disc Access line.

From the installer window, drag the Sophos icon and drop it into the Full Disc Access folder.

Restart your Mac.

All of this may sound too complicated, but believe me, it’s one of the easiest installation processes for free antimalware. The exception is Bitdefender, which is the only virus scanner that can be installed from Apple Store.

How to uninstall Sophos on Mac

Free Sophos comes with uninstall program. If you want to use to uninstall the antivirus, start Spotlight Search on your Mac (use Command and Space keys), and type “remove sophos home”. In the drop-down list, click on the app icon to start it. Follow the uninstall steps. Enter the admin password when required.

However, the uninstall process is not very clean. If you go to System Preferences -> Full Disc Access, you will find its system extension still present.

There is a cleaner way to do it. I use CleanMyMac X to uninstall all apps.

Sophos for Mac Review

Unfortunately, those were all positive findings. And now let me tell you about the negatives.

CPU Usage

I was testing on a MacBook Pro with eight cores. Normally, it can handle most programs. But, when I installed Sophos, all CPU cores were busy for hours doing something. Basically, I wasn’t able to do any work on my laptop and decided to let it stabilize overnight.

To make sure that MacBook does not shut down from overheating, I lifted its back and put it on top of the book. This allowed some airflow which cooled down the CPU.

User Interface

The worst part of Sophos is its user interface.

You can access the app UI from the top bar by clicking on the app icon. However, if you want to make any changes, the program will open a browser and direct you to their website.

Just think about this workflow:

1. You click a button on your Mac.
2. It opens a browser with your account (you have to log on with a username and password).
3. You make a change over the internet in their database.
4. The program on your Mac will pull the configuration from their database over the internet.
5. And then, the configuration will be changed on your Mac.

Do you see a problem?

What if you are not connected to a network?

In case of an attack, one of the first things to do is disconnect to contain the threat, right?

Of what if you experiencing issues with WiFi? You know that in order to enable Real-time protection, in case if it was disabled, you still have to go to Sophos site, enable it there and hope that the program running on your Mac without network access picks it up.

On the other hand, once logged on, you can find a lot of configuration options. I’d say even way too many options. I guess 99% of Mac users wouldn’t know which features to turn on or off.

I think I know why this is a case. Originally, Sophos was developed as a security endpoint for corporate users. In company settings, IT experts will know what which settings means, and they, in fact, appreciate the granularity of config options.

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I just don’t understand why they keep all this complexity for the Home edition.

Sophos Virus Scans

I could live with the underwhelming interface as long as the program was effective in one thing – removing malware.

Let’s see how Sophos handles it. I always test three scan types: fast, full, and custom.

Fast Scan

As with any security software, the goal of the fast scan is to check limited number of folders on the computer – places where the malware is most likely be hiding. Since the number of folders is limited, the process is supposed to be quick. Here are the locations that Sophos checks during fast scan:

• /System/Library/LaunchAgents/
• /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/
• /private/var/root/Library/LaunchAgents/
• /System/Library/StartupItems/
• /Library/StartupItems/
• /Library/LaunchAgents/
• /Library/LaunchDaemons/
• /private/var/run/
• /private/var/tmp/
• /private/etc/
• /private/tmp/
• ~/Public/
• ~/Desktop/
• ~/Documents/
• ~/Downloads/
• ~/Library/Application Support/
• ~/Library/Preferences/
• ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
• /Applications/

The fast scan completed in about 10 minutes. The results, however, were underwhelming.

I copied 117 malware samples to Desktop. Sophos was able to detect and quarantine only 84 of them, or 72%.

It missed a whopping 33 malware files!

For comparison, Avast, another free AV, missed only two threats in a similar test.

The only AV with a similar result was the free Bitdefender scanner. However, the paid Bitdefender detects more than 90% of threats. Let me remind you that the Sophos version I was testing was technically a trial of Premium and not a separate product as in the Bitdefender case.

Full Scan

The next test is a full scan. Usually, you perform the full scan only sparingly, first when you install the software and once in a while when you suspect that your Mac was infected. I ran the scan twice.

The first time, the process was aborted (I don’t know why) after 30 mins. The second run finished in about 2 hours, which is not too bad. For comparison, it took McAfee more than 24 hours to complete the same hardware.

The results of the scan were the same – 33 threats undetected.

Custom Scan

The custom scan is important because you often want to check a hard drive or a flash drive quickly before copying files to your Mac. I’d say I will not use antivirus without the ability to scan external devices.

Unfortunately, Sophos does not allow to chose a custom folder to scan.

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Why?

Because their entire interface is hosted on their website, and as a result, they don’t even know which folders you might have on Mac.

Another strike against the product.

Quarantine and False Positives

Now, you can see how one bad decision (not building native UI for the Mac version) causes multiple problems.

Let’s assume that you ran the AV, and for some reason, it identified one of the files you are working with as a potential threat. Antimalware sometimes flags good files as threats. It happens all the time, and this phenomenon is called false positive.

That’s why antimalware products have a feature called Quarantine. The app temporarily moves the potential threat into a special location where the file can not cause any problems. A user can later review the list of files in the quarantine and decide whether the positive was false or true.

Sophos has quarantine history too, but as you probably guessed it, it is hosted on their website. So, you have to log on, review the list, whitelist it and wait for the program on Mac to pull the list from the network. Again, if your Mac is not connected, then you are out of luck.

Audio and Video Protection

As I mentioned earlier, Sophos has a lot of features. Among them are audio and video protection.

The idea is good. You want to signal users when the microphone or camera is active so you don’t get caught when someone is spying on you.

However, the implementation is underwhelming again.

To know whether audio or video is active, you have to click on the Sophos icon, and in the drop-down menu, you will see the warning. But this is not helpful at all. I don’t want to remember constantly checking the status. I want a proactive notification similar to Little Snitch.

So why was this feature implemented in such a useless way? Because the UI is on the company site, that’s why.

Sophos Free vs. Premium

Although I tested the so-called free version, technically, it was a trial of the Premium edition. After 30 days, it gets downgraded to free, which is limited.

When downgraded, you lose the following features: ransomware protection, audio, and video protection, and premium support (which is expected).

Also, with the free version, you can only have three devices (Mac or Windows) compared to 10 with Premium.

Sophos Free Alternatives

Sophos is not the only free antivirus. There are other alternatives are:

I reviewed them all in my best free antivirus for Mac post.

Is Free Sophos Worth It?

So, time to make some conclusions. Here’s my honest opinion on whether free Sophos is worth it for Mac or not.

Overall, free Sophos for Home’s malware detection rate on Mac stands at 72%, which is below 100% industry standard. This performance and the requirement to use the company site to configure features make Sophos less competitive than other free Mac antivirus alternatives. The complexity of configuration makes Sophos more appropriate for corporate users rather than regular Mac users.