![]() The amount of work that went into The Safe Mac's annual anti-virus program comparison test was immense. I asked if anti-virus software was installed on the machine. His computer was running like crap, and he couldn't figure it out. It has software pre-loaded by his company's MIS staff. His company gave him a Macbook Pro to do his work on, and he brought it with him. He's a Software Engineer doing very well for himself. Ironically, just this past Thursday my son came over for Thanksgiving. Once again, you may want to listen and learn before doing things like making recommendations to Mac users if you are new to the platform. Certainly it's a bad idea to go around recommending a brand of anti-virus software that Mac users have found to unacceptably often be problematic. Given that it's not really necessary to have anti-virus software for the Macintosh, it might be best not to have it at all. But even then, any fully interactive anti-virus software for the Macintosh is likely going to be problematic for a certain percentage of users. There is other, also free, and even more efficacious, anti-virus software that is less frequently problematic. It's just that it is problematic often enough, for a large number of users, that I feel that I have to warn people away from it. So I tell you that I hear from several folks weekly that are having performance problems due to the free version of Sophos, and you are going on an N=2 sample, and you think that you know better? Maybe you thought that I was saying that Sophos is problematic on 100% of installations. You should come to grips with that, or the stuff that you have to say about Mac security will be met with justifiable derision. Once again, no matter what you've been trained in the Windows world, the Macintosh isn't just another PC that's exactly the same. So the fact that there has been malware for the Mac before (though very little of it) doesn't mean that any teenage hacker can come by and use an existing bit of malware as a template to create new malware over and over and over again as has been done on Windows. The Mac is based on Unix and is designed from the ground up for security. ![]() Unlike Windows, the Mac doesn't have a lot of basic apps (e.g. That makes the entire endeavor of creating malware for the Mac not an attractive proposition. But Apple has been rather good at quickly patching the Mac to new threats, so that making money from malware is far from a sure thing. That front money is justified if the bad guys are assured of making a lot of money in return. That time and skill means that it requires a lot of money up front. Why? Because it's really really hard to write malware for the Macintosh. But the flood of malware that the press has been predicting for all that time has never come. If there was going to be a flood of malware for the Mac, it would have come many years ago. After 19 years (just about forever in the computing world, where everything changes really quickly) there has only been a handful of malware for the Macintosh. But I'm not going to use a product now that cannot do anything because it doesn't know what to watch against and that can only degrade the overall performance of the system. If and when a truly nasty set of malware is identified, the A/V developers (and Apple) will create software to address that risk and at that point I would consider if I need to use that software. While you are correct that no device is immune, the Mac is really, really secure and any benefit from any antivirus product on the market is really, really small. ![]() For Big Sur they have not only made the system files read-only, they have encrypted them as well. Apple quickly addresses any identified issues and with each iteration of the OS makes it even harder to attack. ![]() ![]() That lack of known vector means that the developers of the various A/V products don't know what to look for or where to look for strange processes. Any "hole" in macOS will be a new risk, one that is unknown. Click to expand.The real challenge is that at this point the vector that any such attack that is more than just annoying and which is truly malicious would take is not known. ![]()
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