A lot of useful replies. Thanks everyone! I’m going to stick with the built in protections and just be a careful browser.
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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Even on the windows side you are better off with the 1st party defender features these days.
Enterprise use 3rd party AV for central orchestration and control. Theres no reason for this in consumer land.
The threat detection isn't meaningfully better across any of them (aside from some being "astonishingly bad") despite what vendors claim.
The best people to know how to protect your OS are the people that made it.
I use the Defender for Endpoint that comes with my Office subscription but I agree that unless you have an organizational EDR solution that can mitigate the fact you have to open up the system permissions to allow system scanning, it’s probably smarter to use ad block on your browser, use only vetted apps, and not override the default security controls.
That being said it’s probably not realistic to only use App Store apps, or keep things 100% locked down. If you are going to open things up. Use a reputable EDR solution and not just some free program like AVG or malwarebytes.
Another vote for not bothering with any antivirus. Uninstall AVG too.
What is a Virus?
Ok i'll answer the question asked first. if i absolutely had to put a consumer endpoint protection on one of my macs. i'd probably do clamxav again. that said.
after 15 yrs in enterprise apple device management, i still reccomend a solid remote backup solution at the consumer level instead. anyone who claims macs cant get viruses is kidding themselves, but honestly we dont bother attempting to clean infected macs. wipe and restore. put your money into protecting your data and for the love of all gods install the updates.
going crazy and jumping into the jamf consumer level ecosystem is an option as well. but way over the top unless you're really bored with money to burn.
clamxav
ClamAV has a maximum size for files that it will scan, which I believe is 20MB. I can’t tell if clamxav has the same size limit baked in, but it might! So it may not be the best solution if you have large files in your system.
huh, i cant tell if that limitation is in the modern mac version either. eh, i dont recommened buying anti virus anyway. looking into a dns ad blocker like pihole is a good tactic as well. I got tired of my kid turning his windows system into threat to everything on my network. few public block lists on a pihole did more good than the windows anti virus.
Malwarebytes antimalware tool is all you’ll ever need, but after 30+ years of working with Macs, I’ve never encountered a single piece of Mac malware in the wild. It’s astoundingly rare. Almost any piece of Mac malware you hear about is proof of concept and exists almost entirely in a lab somewhere. Or, if it does get out of the wild, patches are almost immediately released by Apple that close any vulnerability.
Also, avast is garbage. Get rid of it 
Oh there’s plenty. You’d be surprised how much old people can get and how quickly they can get it again after paying you to clean it off for them. I’ve seen macbooks with 10s of thousands of infections. Malwarebytes is great though.
This. Used malwarebytes to clean a user profile that had a bunch of adware installed on it. Was all I ever needed. The whole system was not compromised, just a single user profile that I didn’t want to bother regenerating.
Been running Malwarebytes on our macs for several years. No detects. Last time I saw a Mac virus was in the days of wdef (late 80s early 90s).
I got a few bits of malware when my kids were about 10 and went few a phase of clicking on ‘free game’ links. MalwareBytes always managed to clear up the stuff - classified as annoyances.
The free version is fine.
Frankly, I find that shocking, but not unbelievable if it happened in the mid-aughts when there was a brief spate of web bugs (mostly harmless) and which Apple patched within days with their own malware removal tools at the time.
But, yeah, Malwarebytes is the gold standard, and the free version is all you need.
That’s the rough timescale, yup.
Do not install any third-party antivirus software. It's unnecessary and is itself a massive security risk. You have to literally override the built-in protections in order to allow the antivirus application to scan the other applications and files.
This. And if you really want to install something, I recommend a good adblocker (ads are sometimes a vector for malware distribution)
- Safari: AdGuard (free tier is fine)
- Firefox: uBlock origin
- Chrome: uBlock origin
No