following this post , I thought this could be an interesting discussion topics
Personally, I feel that new Mac is a very popular OS, antivirus and anti malware prevention is a must
There are a lot of discussion on the web, this is one of the latest
The article lays it out very well I think. MacOS is by default a more secure OS. That said, I see AV on the Mac similar to a vaccine. You can still get it and pass it on. So if you can eliminate the virus, you also eliminate the chance of infecting others.
I have had Intego and MacScan as my AV and Malware software on all Macs for years. I still see files regularly being quarantined and I am happy for email attachments to be “live” scanned when they come in.
I’m not sure how much good on-device antivirus can do these days. I retired a few years ago but the threats at that time were already more than most large corporations could handle. That’s one reason most companies are closing their data centers and moving to the cloud. I supplemented regular AV with servers that scanned our internet traffic and email but knew we really needed to contract with a 24x7 monitoring service.
If you would like to keep current on threats check out Homepage | CISA. You can subscribe to their weekly bulletins and see what’s trying to bite us (the latest bulletin includes notice of a vulnerability in a popular antivirus program). Or just keep up with what Apple is doing to protect their products. apple - US-CERT Search Results
Ok, lets do some statistics:
83% of malware is created for Windows. 11% is browser related. 3% is created for Android. And the rest is for everything else.
Yes, MacOS and Macs get more popular but not for malware devs. Everything is in a sandbox on Apple. If an app wants to do something you have to give it the rights to do so. This isn’t a very attractive circumstance for malware writers.
If you are using a M1 Mac the chance is even smaller.
Avoid articles by Macworld and similar on this topic. Their article reads like a commercial for anti malware software.
This contains some good advice:
Most of Mac malware is either 3rd party related or user related. Like in 2019 one of the biggest threats was a flash related malware. If you are still using flash in 2019 then I would say it’s the users fault.
Generally speaking, every software you install on any OS will open the gate a little bit more.
Staying close to system apps is always safer than installing everything.
Using the app store is safer than installing apps from the Internet.
Using software that will implement itself into the core level of a computer will be a target more often for malware devs than using software that doesn’t need any rights. Ergo any Mac power cleaning optimizing tools that will be provided with any rights to do anything by the user to work.
One of the biggest threats for M1 Macs, Silver Sparrow is most probably installed by a fake flash update or by pirated software. So… you may see the point.
Apple revoked the rights to install it very fast, so the chance to get it is very low.
The biggest threat to MacOS is, imho, the user itself.
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I work on a company managed (MDM) 16” MacBook Pro 2019 which they loaded with AV-like software, such as Sophos and CarbonBlack. Due to all this software this Mac is slower than the 2015 MacBook Pro (with lesser specs!) that it replaces…
I want to revisit this topic again. Recently there has been a few news regarding the discovery of malware from apps downloaded from Apple App Store. According to this site. There are other article from medium.com on similar topic.
