What's the Best Mac Antivirus?

Austrian independent antivirus testing lab AV-Comparatives regularly subjects dozens of Windows-based antivirus programs t a rigorous battery of tests. They check whether each tool detects thousands of threats from hundreds of malware families and also run daily tests using brand-new threats to evaluate real-world protection. Now the well-regarded lab has released an initial report on antivirus tools specifically for the Mac platform.

According to the report, "the claim that Apple users are less threatened than Windows users is currently still correct, but could change rapidly. It was the low market share of Macs that limited the attention of online criminals. Now that Macs are becoming more popular, this state of affairs is changing." 

In addition, phishing and other social engineering attacks are completely platform-independent. They rely instead on tricking the user. AV-Comparatives offers these words of advice for all Mac users:

• Never use an administrator account for day-to-day computing.
• Use a sandboxed browser such as Google Chrome
• Uninstall/disable the standalone Flash Player
• Uninstall/disable the Java Player
• Keep your Mac operating system up-to-date with the latest patches
• Use secure passwords (the Mac includes the KeyChain password manager)
• Deactivate any services such as Sirport, Bluetooth, or IPv6 that you don't use
• Despite what you may hear, you should use security software.

For this test, the researchers users 477 samples from 2011 and 2012, almost all of them belonging to the and FakeAlert families. Yes, that's far fewer that they use in Windows-based tests; while Mac malware is rising, the number of distinct threats is still far lower.

None of the products generated false positives—erroneous reports that a valid program is malicious. , , and ZeoBit MacKeeper 2012 all detected 100 percent of the threats, with close behind at 98.5 percent.

Other products didn't score quite as high a detection rate. ESET Cyber Security Pro detected 96.9 percent, managed 90.6 percent, and brought up the rear with 83.4 percent.

Despite the range of scores, the lab declined to apply its usual rating system to the tested products. AV-Comparatives co-founder Peter Stelzhammer explained that there's "too much difference in the products, but all are OK." The full report offers a complete review of each product along with a features chart for ease in making your own comparison.