iMac Anti Virus

Norkie

Norkie

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Hi all, I'm the owner of a new iMac, learning curve coming up :eek:

I've read on various forums the differing views on anti-virus and firewalls on Mac machines etc. What do you do?

I don't want to start another thread if one already exists though, so please point me in the right direction ;)

Many thanks.
 
Thank you. I have BT Broadband and they offer McAfee as part of the package bundle, I think I would prefer some kind of policing ;)
 
Craig1912 said:
Think most people will say it’s not necessary but I use Sophos Home which seems OK

https://home.sophos.com/mac
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I use Sophos on Mac as well, its not that well known because it has never been sold in the consumer or small business market, as they have had a focus on selling to large organisations, and generally regarded as being the best there is.

I've never really sorted out why they suddenly decided to offer a free version for Mac, as their policy in the past has been to price Sophos at a level that would force consumers/small businesses to buy something else as they only wanted to provide support to fellow IT professionals. Having said that, if your company used Sophos, all employees automatically had access to a home use license (including support at home). And once you got above a few hundred licenses, they went from being the most expensive option to being the least expensive.

Mind you, it's possibly a very different company now a days, but my experiences with Sophos in the past have been very good, and I have used the Mac versions since it first became available. Its trapped several viruses during this time, but they have all been Windows viruses, that its deleted so I don't run the risk of forwarding them onto a Windows user.
 
Thanks Graham, we have Sophos at work, but I retire soon so maybe not the best option for me cost wise.

Having said that, the website indicates a free version for home use, interesting.
 
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Norkie said:
Thanks Graham, we have Sophos at work, but I retire soon so maybe not the best option for me cost wise.

Having said that, the website indicates a free version for home use, interesting.
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Yes, the Mac home version of Sophos is free, which is why it wasn't a difficult decision for me to put in on my Macs. But that is also why I was puzzled when they released it, as it seemed an unlikely thing for Sophos to do.

When I no longer had access to a free copy of Sophos for Windows, and decided I couldn't afford the single user license of over £100, I went with Eset Nod32, who also now do a Mac version (have done for several years). And if I wasn't using Sophos, I would pay the money for the Mac version of Nod 32.
 
I've used Sophos in an Enterprise environment and the detection rates were poor. First you were alerted to an infection it was already on a machine.

Personally on a Mac I'd worry more about Malware/Website Reputation than Viruses per say. I don't really have any recommendations, Sophos has been my only experience on a Mac.
 
neil_g said:
I've used Sophos in an Enterprise environment and the detection rates were poor. First you were alerted to an infection it was already on a machine.

Personally on a Mac I'd worry more about Malware/Website Reputation than Viruses per say. I don't really have any recommendations, Sophos has been my only experience on a Mac.
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Interesting, its been a long time since I have been involved with Sophos at an enterprise level, but at the time they were considered better than the alternatives, and they still seem to get good reviews when I have checked. Maybe I need to look into this again.
 
myotis said:
Interesting, its been a long time since I have been involved with Sophos at an enterprise level, but at the time they were considered better than the alternatives, and they still seem to get good reviews when I have checked. Maybe I need to look into this again.
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I used them for about 10 years, I think at one point they were "ok" on tests but in real world experience it did let stuff through.
 
Kaspersky Internet Security is available for mac's

I have used Kaspersky Internet Security on my windows box for years without any issues.
 
neil_g said:
I used them for about 10 years, I think at one point they were "ok" on tests but in real world experience it did let stuff through.
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Interesting, as that doesn't match my experience of Sophos at all. They always came out top in reviews, and I used to manually run two other AV programs at regular intervals as a backup to Sophos, and I had no experience of Sophos ever missing anything. And like you this was probably across a ten year period.

It's strange how people seem to have totally different experiences with the same things, my experiences with Sophos has left me a bit of fan, not just of the software itself, but also the speed they updated virus signatures, and the excellent technical support, where as your experience was obviously very different, and has left you rather luke warm about the company.
 
I work for a large financial plc with over 40000 employees and we have Sophos so it must be pretty good as we are absolutely paranoid (quite rightly) over security
 
myotis said:
Interesting, as that doesn't match my experience of Sophos at all. They always came out top in reviews, and I used to manually run two other AV programs at regular intervals as a backup to Sophos, and I had no experience of Sophos ever missing anything. And like you this was probably across a ten year period.

It's strange how people seem to have totally different experiences with the same things, my experiences with Sophos has left me a bit of fan, not just of the software itself, but also the speed they updated virus signatures, and the excellent technical support, where as your experience was obviously very different, and has left you rather luke warm about the company.
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I've not got a problem with the company, their network security appliances like the UTM and XTM are very good (albeit rebadged Astaro kit following their aquisition). Their premium support is also generally pretty good.

But unfortunately like I say the AV would only really alert once a malicious package was on the machine and did not stop it from arriving there to start with.

Craig1912 said:
I work for a large financial plc with over 40000 employees and we have Sophos so it must be pretty good as we are absolutely paranoid (quite rightly) over security
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They generally offer very competitive pricing and undercut others significantly at tender etc. Read into that as you will.
 
Craig1912 said:
I work for a large financial plc with over 40000 employees and we have Sophos so it must be pretty good as we are absolutely paranoid (quite rightly) over security
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And yet the most effective from a zero-day protection perspective was historically AVG, primarily because there were so many free users out there that AVG were usually the first to 'see' a virus using their heuristics.

Unfortunately there is no number 1, ESET was pretty damn good, then the next version was rubbish, but users were locked into a 5-year subscription, so would be stuck using a shockingly bad solution until hopefully the next version resolved the issues or their catch-rate increased.

Bitdefender was also pretty good from a security standpoint (years ago), however it had a habit of killing VSS, which took them around a year to improve.

For every solution that claims to be amazing and include identity-theft protection, spam protection, malware etc... there is ALWAYS a tradeoff.
 
Neilc28 said:
Unfortunately there is no number 1, ESET was pretty damn good, then the next version was rubbish, but users were locked into a 5-year subscription, so would be stuck using a shockingly bad solution until hopefully the next version resolved the issues or their catch-rate increased.
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I'm very interested in this comment about ESET, can you point me towards some info on this, as its what I have "just continued using" on my seldom used Windows computer, because when I started using it, it was the only one that seemed to be as good as Sophos. But "shockingly bad solution" sounds a bit worrying.
 
I was referring more to the introduction of V4+ which bought with it some cases of virus definitions which hung the kernel at 100% and was deployed everywhere, causing massive consequences at my work, the current management tool for nodes is horrendous and requires a virtual instance to be deployed.

The home-version to be fair is probably nowhere near as bad, and you have no need for a node management element :)
 
Neilc28 said:
I was referring more to the introduction of V4+ which bought with it some cases of virus definitions which hung the kernel at 100% and was deployed everywhere, causing massive consequences at my work, the current management tool for nodes is horrendous and requires a virtual instance to be deployed.

The home-version to be fair is probably nowhere near as bad, and you have no need for a node management element :)
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Ah, thanks. I assumed you were meaning detection capability rather than its implementation. I actually have no idea what version I'm on. I just keep my subscription up to date, and check it updates to the current date when I boot up.
 
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