Mar 22, 2014  If I think my mac could be infected (It's not, but I don't wanna take the risk) and I heard quite good reviews of Avast!, should I try it out? I already tried using a free antivirus found on the AppStore (VirusBarrier Express) but it didn't worked as expected. Bluestacks program.

There are some people saying that people should use an antivirus software on Mac. And there are thousands of people claiming that Macs don't get viruses (under this term I mean spyware / malware as well), some even say that it's just a trick from antivirus companies to say that there is a need for antivirus. Honestly, I'm a bit confused. I don't want to waste resources on a possible unnecessary antivirus software, but I want to have my computer safe. If it's common knowledge that Macs don't get viruses for quite some years now, shouldn't there be some bad people thriving to prove this wrong?

( Edit, here is a quite recent reference on people dismissing antivirus softwares on mac:. I'll answer in the form of an anecdote. Back in 2003, I was working in tech support for a Mac-based organisation. 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. Someone managed to bring a Word macro virus into the system. It executed only within Microsoft Word but the macro language is the same across Windows and Mac computers so it ran just fine. As well as documents, it could infect the preferences file and after that, any Word document you opened up on that same computer.

As files were shared around, more and more computers were infected. 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. On a Windows machine, the virus in question also attempted to deleted the C: drive.

Of course, that didn't work on a Mac so we were unaware that we even had the virus. It didn't affect us until we sent it to the government. The clean up was a big pain. The computers were spread from Cairns to Adelaide and there were only three of us in the IT department. The key point here is that even malware that doesn't affect your Mac can still affect your life and/or business. Native Mac malware is rare but is.

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. However, antivirus is still a mixed bag. 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. Even without malware to exploit flaws, anti-virus flaws can still cause problems on your computer. In most cases, normal users are better off running some brand of antivirus. Excel for mac 2015 data form. (Note that this includes Apple's own File Quarantine system. If your version of Mac OS X has that, you already have anti-virus protection and I wouldn't recommend getting another one.).

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. Rich Mogull on the blog explains: Far less malware exists for Macs, but even there we see limited effectiveness across tools. For example, in a recent test by Thomas Reed, even the best Mac malware tool detected only 90 percent of the known malware samples used. This is a poor showing — we only see dozens of Mac malware variants per year, compared to 65,000 per day for Windows. Despite Flashback being used as a call to arms to encourage people to adopt antivirus tools, most of those tools failed to detect Flashback for weeks — until it was highly publicized.