Microsoft operating systems may soon have competition as the most popular malware targets, because the bad guys are making serious inroads with Apple products. Just yesterday, my friend's Apple notebook caught some new form of ransomware and is completely locked up.

German institute AV-TEST has conducted a new series of antivirus tests, this time on Mac OS X, to determine the best security products for Apple’s desktop operating system. Avast for Mac Free Download & Installation. Avast for Mac is unfortunately not available on iTunes or App Store. But you can simply download Avast Free Mac Security using the link below: From the Official Avast Servers. After you finish the download you can proceed with the installation. German institute AV-TEST has conducted a new series of antivirus tests, this time on Mac OS X, to determine the best security products for Apple’s desktop operating system. In AV-Comparatives’ test, AVG detected 100% of the tested Mac- and PC-based malware, making it a solid selection for virus detection. The testing team also praised the software for its easy-to-use and straightforward interface.

Seeing an emerging trend, AV-TEST GmbH, an independent IT security and antivirus research house, started testing antimalware products for Apple in 2014, Mac OS X in the Crosshairs - 18 Malware Scanners Put to the Test. AV-TEST just released its 2015 survey, Mac OS X under attack - 10 security packages put to the test. The 2015 report starts out with good news, 'While the first test of OS X security solutions in 2014 revealed that many products had massive problems in malware detection, the results in the 2015 test were significantly better.'

The 10 systems tested are:

Avast Mac Security - free
Avira Free Antivirus
Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac
Kaspersky Internet Security
Symantec Norton Security
Intel Security/McAfee Internet Security
Intego VirusBarrier
Sophos Anti-Virus - free
Webroot SecureAnywhere
ClamXav - free

Test setup

One reason to pay attention to AV-TEST reports is the willingness of company management to publish, in detail, the procedures used during the testing. This test report was no different.

All products were installed on identical iMacs with a 2.7 GHz Core i5 CPU, 16 GB memory, and a 500 GB SSD hard disk running OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) with recent updates.
All test systems were connected to the internet, so the products could reach their respective cloud and reputation services.
Each product was installed and ran on the test system individually.
All product versions were cross-checked with the developer's website (when available) to ensure that we had the latest product version and updates installed (before the start of each test).

Maik Morgenstern, one of the company's CEOs and technical director, mentioned, 'We only tested downloadable products offered at the AV vendors' websites. The versions available at the Mac App Store appeared to be limited in functionality.'

Testing for malware detection

To be realistic, care was taken in creating the test set of more than 160 malware threats. 'All samples are confirmed to include malicious functionality,' explained Morgenstern. 'During the creation of the test set, we selected the most recent samples from several different malware families.'

Morgenstern added, 'There may be archive files included in the test set, as long as the specific malware is distributed that way (e.g. DMG or PKG).'

As for the actual tests, engineers performed on-demand scans of 'native' malware, Potentially Unwanted Applications (PUA), and Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUP) samples, including scripts.

When the initial test run was finished, the engineers checked for application updates; if any were available, they were installed and the application was tested again to see if the updated version detected samples missed earlier. On-access tests were also run twice. Morgenstern said, 'However, we excluded archives as such formats are not scanned by all products.'

The report stated that Avast, Avira, Bitdefender, Kaspersky, and Symantec had 100% malware detection. The only antimalware that had detection rates less than 88% was the security package from ClamXav, detecting 39.6% of the malware threats.

No false positives

Engineers at AV-TEST understand that false positives are the bane of the antimalware industry. If false positives appear regularly, users will ignore both false positives and real warnings. The 2015 report explains how AV-TEST engineers check for false positives:

'We perform an on-demand scan while installing and using the top 100 products for the Mac OS X platform. This includes, but is not limited to Adobe Reader XI, Apache OpenOffice, CCleaner, Firefox, GIMP, Google Chrome, iTunes, Java Runtime Environment, Libre Office, Opera, Picasa, Raw Therapee, Safari, Skype, Thunderbird, Virtualbox, and VLC media player.'

Morgenstern added, 'Only Webroot sounded a warning twice in the test when launching programs. The other security solutions passed this test category without a glitch.'

Performance slowdown

Almost as bad as false positives are system slowdowns due to inefficient antimalware programs. To test for slowdowns, AV-TEST engineers first created a reference baseline by timing how long a Mac OS X reference machine without antimalware took to copy 20 - 30 GB of files (documents, media files, presentations, and programs). That averaged out to 66.1 seconds. The adjacent slide lists the results, with Symantec Norton Utility ending up on top.

Free vs. paid versions

The free versions of antimalware held their own. As for features, Morgenstern told me the free versions were spartan. He added, 'Most paid versions were not much better feature-wise, but were better equipped than the freeware solutions.' For example:

Intel Security (McAfee) and Norton include a firewall
Kaspersky offers parental control

Bottom line

What I took away from the tests and Morgenstern's explanations was that, except for ClamXav, the OS X security package you choose from this list of 10 appears to be a matter of personal preference.

It might be best to reiterate something Morgenstern mentioned earlier: make sure to download the antimalware program from the manufacturer's website or purchase the boxed version from a retail store.

Also see

Security and Privacy: New Challenges (ZDNet/TechRepublic special feature)

Disclaimer: TechRepublic and ZDNet are CBS Interactive properties.

Many casual users may think that identifying the best Mac antivirus software in 2019 is rather redundant, given that Macs 'don't get viruses.'

Yet although Apple machines are targeted less than their Windows counterparts, they can still be infected - and the risks are increasing, which is why you need protection.

Every product in this list has been chosen because it's especially designed to protect Mac systems and has scored highly at identifying and removing viruses and malware.

We've also highlighted the overall best antivirus

The macOS operating system is based on Unix, which is sandboxed, meaning it can be very difficult for viruses to do any damage. Think of them as locked in a little box from which they can’t escape, no matter how hard they try.

This means that you will need specific Mac antivirus software - whether that be the very strongest paid-for protection or a free download that we've picked out at the bottom of this guide - that's been designed to work with the unique demands that macOS has.

So read on for our top choices...

Want your company or services to be added to this buyer’s guide? Please email your request to desire.athow@futurenet.com with the URL of the buying guide in the subject line.

Mac antivirus: which is best at detecting threats?

The excellent AV-TEST regularly puts anti-virus programs through their paces, and their most recent tests took place in June 2018 on macOS High Sierra. They tested two key areas: how well the packages detected Mac-specific threats, and how well they protected against Macs in mixed-OS environments being hijacked to

Avast For Mac Put To The Test