Do you use antivirus software?

Finally

 

As already stated, the number of years of experience anyone has is pointless, since macOS/OS X has only been around 17 years. Also, it doesn't matter how many years of experience anyone has, but rather what they have learned in their years. There are people who repeat the same year of experience 20 times, and others who have 20 years of progressive, growing, expanding experience. There's a vast difference. Those claiming there are true viruses in the wild that can affect macOS demonstrate they are of the former group.

It's impossible to find a true macOS virus in the wild because none have ever been released. It does not follow that it couldn't happen someday, only that it hasn't happened yet. Even if it does, no antivirus app will protect you, since none would detect a zero-day threat. However, safe computing has protected many against zero-day threats in the past.

This is true for many AV apps. Even for the ones that don't negatively impact performance, if the user is practicing safe computing, AV apps offer no increase in security. Some potentially introduce unnecessary vulnerabilities. For anyone with enough common sense to be careful about what they install, AV apps present more risk than protection.

No one with any knowledge is claiming that. I and others have repeatedly stated that no OS is immune to malware.

It's common knowledge that if you choose to run an AV app, you should run only one at a time, since running more than one can produce false positives.

Of course they are. They are better equipped to make such a decision if they hear the truth about Mac malware, and not just the FUD being spread by antivirus software companies.

Changing the mind of anyone posting is not the issue. Thousands of new Mac users read these threads to learn about how to get the most from their Macs. Many come from the Windows world, where the malware scene has been quite different. They deserve to know the truth about malware as it relates to Macs, so they won't get suckered by the software companies' propaganda. That's why we continue to refute false information posted in this forum.

No, you haven’t. So far, you’ve produced rather innocuous adware and a few instances of malware that doesn’t even work on current macOS versions, all of which can be avoided without needing antivirus software. You have failed to produce proof of even one true macOS virus that has ever existed in the wild. You haven’t proven anything, except your lack of understanding about this issue and your willingness to believe the sales pitches of antivirus software companies that you continue to quote as “research” or “proof”.

So first you try to prove your superiority by claiming 30 years of experience, as if the number of years matters. Then you dismiss someone who has more experience than you. Very convincing!

Your “proof” was mostly sponsored content (advertisements) or quotes directly from software companies trying to peddle their antivirus apps. Sorry, but that’s not considered proof of anything, except some people’s gullibility in believing everything they read, without considering the source.

We’ve been asking you to produce proof of even ONE macOS virus in the wild and you still haven’t done it.

Everyone agrees that macOS malware exists. However, the malware that currently exists in the wild is not of a serious nature (mostly adware and other such “nuisanceware”), and all can easily be avoided without installing an antivirus app.

So, till you prove the existence of a single macOS virus in the wild with links, you have no clue what you are talking about.

Hold yourself to the same standard that you ask of others.

 

The 'No's have it !

Malware bytes is good, I'd use it, but only if i ran into problems... Other than that its just software "telling" me that i am good.

I can do that myself.

 

Antivirus is and will remain ALWAYS behind new malware. With that argument any Windows antivirus used in the world should be seen as ineffective. That is of course pure nonsense. Better a non immediate cure that no cure at all. Pure common sense.

I have found and installed antivirus for mac entirely free of charge!

I have checked the disk space used by antivirus installations in my mac and it is at the most a hundred or so MBytes. Not a big deal.
As to your warnings of "system files ramdomly being destroyed"", "emails being eaten away" and other supposed catastrophic effects, I stated clearly that after installing several antivirus in one single computer, I could not detect nothing being "destroyed", nothing slowing my computer or affecting its performance enough to be felt BY ME.
You are making small things looke like terrible monsters.
Real life is in my experience by far not as black as you paint it and (as you acknowledge yourself) ANY software uses space and ressources.
So what if they do?
Should we give up Adobe, Office and co. because they take computer ressources (and in much greater extent!) and ultimately leave an entirely naked OS?
What use would such an "untouched" OS configuration with no resources at all "eaten away" bring to any user?
Maybe you truly suffered all that terrible havoc you mention because of some kind of antivirus installation you once undertook.
I can only speak of my own experience and in my mac nothing of that kind happened or was felt by me.
Ed

--- Post Merged, Dec 8, 2018 ---

No, they are not at all "useless" as you state by yourself since they help other people one is in touch with.
I believe that helping others and not just selfishly taking care of one's own system is a very important thing in our present online world.
Ed

 

Bye-bye

As for this thread title :

Do you use antivirus software?

Stupid header, as in..there are no macOS viruses... so there's 100% no need to install one.

 

Anyone running a Windows system who fails to take responsibility for that system and adequately prepare for the malware threats on that platform deserves what he gets. 99.4% of known malware is for Windows. 0.3% is for Android. EVERYTHING ELSE (macOS, iOS, all the Linux distros, all variants of UNIX other that Mac, iOS, and Linux, all non-UNIX OSes, together account for the last 0.3%. The threat level for Windows justifies using antimalware. The threat level for Android is a bit short of justifiying the use of antimalware. The threat level for everything else is well short of justifying the use of antimalware.

And, oh, to anticipate the use (again) of the marketshare argument, please note that the #1 most commonly used operating system worldwide is... Android. Which has 0.3% of the malware on the loose. It ain't the marketshare that makes Windows a happy hunting ground for malware producers, it's that Microsoft didn't take security seriously for a very long time and is still playing catch-up. during the 1980s and 1990s Apple repeatedly changed things to kill whole classes of malware. Microsoft did not. The mess we have is the result of Microsoft's incompetence and arrogance.

If you really think that using useless antimalware which you _know_ will not protect against any real threat if/when a real threat arrives is a good idea, carry on. Go ahead and waste your time, CPU cycles, and RAM. Some of us have better things to do... and have not seen any Mac malware on our systems for TWENTY YEARS, going back to before OS X, to a time when there actually _were_ real threats.

And you still can't provide that list of the top 10 Mac malware which must be dealt with using antimalware. Nor will you ever.

 

1st i said BASICALLY useless, that qualifier gave some wiggle room.
But if you want to go all sith and deal in absolutes, the reason and one might argue it is completely useless because as I stated I mentioned unprotected machines.

Almost no one people outside of IT people who are knowledgeable enough run a unprotected machine and even then there's usually plenty of patches for some major vulnerabilities.

Most people if they're not running some third-party antivirus running are running Windows defender because it defaults on.
that is enough to negate most threats to the point that it shouldn't be your concern as a Mac user.

If you are the type of person who worries beyond that but you're also not the type of experienced computer user to avoid problems, then you probably need to air gap your machine.
in the name of helping others and protecting yourself from the present online world.

 

The name of the currently active virus affecting the macOS is _________.
No links, please. Just fill in the name of the virus. Then we can all do our own research. (It shouldn't take long, if a name can be supplied.)

 

Yes, there is a lag between the time a new malware is released in the wild and the time that it is discovered and antivirus apps are updated to detect it. These are called zero-day threats. As for Windows antivirus apps, they are effective in defending against known viruses, but they provide no protection whatsoever for a zero-day threat. When it comes to a zero-day threat, a non-immediate defense is no better than no defense at all, since neither provide protection. On the other hand, practicing safe computing has effectively protected millions of users from zero-day threats, when no anti-malware app could.

The price, drive space requirements or even processing requirements of antivirus apps are not the issue. The issue is that they are unnecessary to keep a Mac malware-free, they can lull a user into a false sense of security, and some of them have been used as an attack vector, introducing vulnerability that wouldn't exist without them.

The argument that Mac users should install antivirus apps to protect Windows users that they share files with is a fallacy. If you really are concerned about helping your Windows friends, encourage them to install their own antivirus software, so they'll be protected against malware from all sources, and not just from files that you share with them. If you don't, then all your argument is good for is that if they get infected from another source, you can say with confidence, "Hey! It's not my fault!" How much help is that?

 

Please no unnecessary confusions.
Android is not used in COMPUTERS and the possibilities that computers offer to cyber criminals who create all the active virus and trojans and spread them are HUGE as compared to infecting Android running cell phones and tablets.
I am no IT expert but many people discussing computer safety have always explained that precisely the wide acceptance world wide of Windows as the most succesful OS for computers has always made much more profitable to create malware dedicated to Windows run systems.
Why make efforts to infect relatively few systems... when the overwhelming majority of computer users in the whole world run some form of Windows? The more infected systems the more money goes to cyber thieves and that spells W i n d o w s.

It's difficult to judge from outside how carelessly Microsoft might or might not have been in the past but they are presently trying very strongly to protect their OS judging by IT experts (the very respected German "c't" Magazine) who tested the present Windows Defender freely supplied with Windows 10 and found it not at all inferior in catching all kind of malware to well known commercial antivirus sold in the market.
Ed

 

Android cell phones are computers. So are iOS phones. My iPhone 6 has a more powerful CPU, more RAM, and almost as much storage than the desktop systems I had in use until relatively few years ago.

To show you how careless Microsoft was in the past, look up how to bypass the login password on Win95. Then look up how long it took to get that fixed. Then look up the special Administrator account in Windows NT, the one present in every single version of NT up to and including Windows NT 10, a.k.a Win10. The one which didn't, and still doesn't, have any password at all. Look up how easy it was to get to that account and what you could do with it. Microsoft has now, finally, in Win 10 locked that account down but it was wide open for _decades_ They simply didn't care about security, and it showed.

 

The place for running antivirus is on one's firewall like pfSense.

 

I've owned and still use Symantec Norton Anti-Virus for so many years that I don't remember when I bought it. Symantec still updates the virus definitions just about every day, I update them every 3 or 4 weeks. The app is 32 bit, but still seems to work.

Lou

 

32-bit apps will continue to work for a while. Apple will be locking them out some time in the future, possibly with 10.15, they haven't said.

I do not recommend using antimalware on Macs. I especially do not recommend paying for antimalware on Macs. In particular I really recommends staying far, far, FAR away from Norton/Symantec and McAfee. YMMV.

 

It's a Red Herring. There is nothing to update. The app is not doing anything.

 

I'm well aware of the upcoming 32 bit limitation, hence the reason I mentioned it. As far as your recommendation, I'll take it with a grain of salt. As I said, I've been using NAV for longer than I can remember on many machines with absolutely no issues. And, as I also said, Symantec keeps the definitions updated daily.

Don't believe that's true. Every time I insert a device, download new software, or open new software for the first time, I get a box that says it is scanning.

Lou

 

Does anyone know what kind of permissions you give to your anti-virus software?
Could it be that by using the software you agree the manufacturer of the anit-virus gets access to ALL your documents? Could it also be that in order to analyse a possible threat the anti-virus developer may send the files on your hard disc that needs to be inspected to their headquarters? And where are those? And under whose jurisdiction are they in case of a disagreement?

And could this represent a serious security risk?

I just try to add some fuel on this always heat producing and in the end fulminant discussion about this subject. And yes I have an Anti-virus thing on my computer. But it always is switched off because it disables more than that it protects. But from time to time I wonder:

What is riskier, a virus threat or the actual presence of anti-virus software that may breach your privacy?

(oh yes! I don't need answers from anyone that relates risk to Windozzzzzze I can doze on my own..... ;-)

 

It detects and deals with (up to 97% of) Windows malware. That's something.

--- Post Merged, Dec 9, 2018 ---

Yes, it scans... for Windows malware. It also picks up adware, if any, and other minor problems on Macs. And it slows your system down and eats RAM. Launch Activity Monitor and have a look at how much CPU cycles and RAM it uses while scanning.

--- Post Merged, Dec 9, 2018 ---

Depending on the software, you might need admin privs to install the antimalware and once installed it would run with admin privs. If it didn't need admin privs to run, then it would run at whatever level your account is set to. Almost all Mac and Windows home users run accounts which have full admin privs. Both Apple and Microsoft recommend using non-admin accounts, but doing things like installing software and even running some software (TurboTax, the last, the very last, time that I tried it, for example) is a pain in a non-admin account. Business users are usually restricted to non-admin accounts unless they actually are admins.

If the antimalware has full admin privs, it has full access to every single file on the system. It has to have that access to do its job. This is one reason why antimalware such as Sophos and ClamXAV are so slow: they must literally scan each of the hundreds of thousands of files on the system on a regular basis, and they're not real good at it. Norton/Symantec and McAfee and others are much better, but they're prone to errors precisely because they take short cuts to go fast. Every now and again they mistake innocent files for malware. My fav example of that was the time that Norton for Windows mistook itself for malware and tried to delete itself... and started screaming that attack malware was deleting it. Great fun was had by all fixing _that_. McAfee once thought that 'svchost' was malware; there is Windows malware which impersonates the real svchost, to try to get past antimalware. McAfee thought that the real svchost was that malware and killed it. Systems so afflicted had serious problems connecting to networks. All networks. There would be a _reason_ why I don't let Norton/Symantec or McAfee near any of my systems.

 

Why don't we just ban posts about AV software? If anyone wants to know about AV software, they can just search. Nothing new ever comes from these new discussions.

But while we're at it, I'll go ahead and throw in my two cents.
1. It's "Mac", not "MAC"
2. All viruses are malware but not all malware are viruses.
3. Good luck finding an actual macOS virus.
4. AV software can't defend against a specific virus until the virus has been identified and the AV's virus definitions updated to protect against said virus. Since there are no macOS specific viruses in the wild, there is no AV software that can defend against some current potential future macOS virus threat.
5. I ditched Windows years ago. Been using a Mac as my only computer for probably 15 years. Never ran AV. I always upgrade (not fresh install) when a new OS comes out and I transfer my accounts when I get a new computer. For kicks, I downloaded Malwarebytes this morning and gave it a whirl. It found one instance of some Yahoo adware. I think I'll continue to not use any AV software.

 

Yeah, it's true (other than the point above about Windows; I should have clarified that I meant there are no Mac virus definitions to update). Just because the software reports to you that it's running does not mean it's doing anything (useful, that is; another lack of clarity in my post). It never finds anything, does it? That's because it's an imposter. There is nothing to scan for on your macOS.

 

Yes so the Anti-Virus can also send your files (mine) to their 'headquartes' anywhere in the world. Which means it is behaving as an excellent piece of spy-ware.....!!!???

 

You certainly don't sound like you do. You sound like a college freshman who thinks they've got it all figured out.

and

No. No. No. Debunked several times.
Also, I don't expect you to know this, not being an IT person, but here goes:

The entire goddamn world runs on Linux.

The smartphones (Android!!), the set top boxes, the smart fridges, the supercomputers, datacenters, render farms, car infotainment systems. If it has a CPU inside, it can probably run Linux, and usually DOES run Linux.

Cyber thieves go for MONEY, not more infected systems. More uncle George's home PCs aren't worth much compared to vital pieces of network infrastructure or smart cars. Linux is a huge target.

Same goes for the Mac. Let's be honest here, poor people don't usually have Macs, while the most awfully rich people in the world (e.g. any celebrity ever) do. Macs are a huge target.
(Also, compared to the Windows world, most Mac users don't use any kind of antimalware and believe in the inherent security in macOS, making such Mac A JUICY ****ING TARGET!)

Despite all this, Windows is the platform most plagued by malware of all kinds (even true viruses).

 

Laugh, but all the articles support what I have said. But no one here has proven me wrong "YET" with any links that say otherwise. Like I said, end of discussion till that happens. This discussion actually happened recently on Reddit, and it proves how uneducated people are in believing their Macs are safe.

 

All of the articles you posted show ZERO macOS viruses and easily avoidable malware or adware. You haven't proven anything except our points, not yours. You still have failed to provide ONE bit of evidence that a macOS virus has ever existed.

 

Same for me.