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[MacOS] Anti-virus recommendations? (self.apple_enthusiast)

submitted 9 months ago by Veedem to c/apple_enthusiast

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Looking for some insight into what everyone is using for antivirus. I have AVG a whirl but I experienced some weird stuttering on my M2 MacBook Air, so obviously I want something that is minimally impactful on performance while still being accurate.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

Malwarebytes antimalware tool is all you’ll ever need, but after 30+ years of working with Macs, I’ve never encountered a single piece of Mac malware in the wild. It’s astoundingly rare. Almost any piece of Mac malware you hear about is proof of concept and exists almost entirely in a lab somewhere. Or, if it does get out of the wild, patches are almost immediately released by Apple that close any vulnerability.

Also, avast is garbage. Get rid of it

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I got a few bits of malware when my kids were about 10 and went few a phase of clicking on ‘free game’ links. MalwareBytes always managed to clear up the stuff - classified as annoyances.

The free version is fine.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Frankly, I find that shocking, but not unbelievable if it happened in the mid-aughts when there was a brief spate of web bugs (mostly harmless) and which Apple patched within days with their own malware removal tools at the time.

But, yeah, Malwarebytes is the gold standard, and the free version is all you need.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

That’s the rough timescale, yup.

[–] agent_flounder 2 points 9 months ago

Been running Malwarebytes on our macs for several years. No detects. Last time I saw a Mac virus was in the days of wdef (late 80s early 90s).

[–] Nogami 2 points 9 months ago

This. Used malwarebytes to clean a user profile that had a bunch of adware installed on it. Was all I ever needed. The whole system was not compromised, just a single user profile that I didn’t want to bother regenerating.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Oh there’s plenty. You’d be surprised how much old people can get and how quickly they can get it again after paying you to clean it off for them. I’ve seen macbooks with 10s of thousands of infections. Malwarebytes is great though.