free antivirus and antispyware for MACs?

[shagadelic45200]

are there any good free anti-virus/spyware apps for MACs? I;m brand new to MACs and usually use Avast, AVG, Adaware,and Spybot........

 

[72930]

There are NO VIRUSES FOR MACS. You DO NOT need one.

People who use them use them to scan for windows viruses incase you are sending files to an unprotected PC...

 

[netdog]

You really don't need it (except on your Parallels and Bootcamp installs). I switched in Jan 2006, and all my antivirus ever found was Windows viruses that Norton never seemed to catch in my email

Trust me, no spyware or antivirus issues here.

 

[DeSnousa]

Yes there are a couple - but with on Macs they only slow down your system as you do not need it. Just save your money and become more productive

 

[mkrishnan]

Anti-Virus -- ClamXAV -- Clam is open source, free, and excellent in quality. Good enough that the next version of OS X Server (Leopard Server) will use it as its core server-level AV technology. There aren't really OS X viruses in the wild, but this is very effective at identifying and eliminating Windows viruses, and it is regularly updated. I have it on both of my Macs but honestly do not enable the background scanner nor do I do regular scans. When I last did a scan, the only viruses I found were in junk mail in my Mail trash folder that I had not yet deleted (relatively old junk mail from before server-side scanning became efficient). So there wasn't even any real risk of me transmitting a Windows virus to a Windows user.

Spyware/Adware -- this is harder, because it doesn't really properly exist on Macs at this point, and even if Windows ones found their way onto your computer, there's no way for them to transmit to other computers... MacScan has a free trial version. I installed it on one of my Macs and ran it once and found it to be a waste of time.