Free antivirus solutions for the Mac [u]
When it comes to “free as in beer” malware scanners, there aren’t a lot of choices. There are plenty of limited time trials available. Still, with only a couple of trojans and no self-replicating viruses or worms that target Mac OS X, how much choice do the rest of us really need?
At least it’s fast
PC Tools iAntiVirus is available in free and for pay versions, and presents some unique trade offs in terms of usability and performance.
Bizarrely, this application is only half an application. That is, although the application window looks Mac, it’s quite obviously just a Windows port and I can’t think of single example when that doesn’t suck.
[u] The media person for PCTools, Emma Copeman, emailed to say that iAntiVirus was built from the ground for the Mac by Mac engineers. I stand corrected. Thanks, Emma.[u]
Also, unless you reset its preferences (requires Mac restart), iAntiVirus doesn’t show up in the dock as an application and you can’t switch to it by pressing ⌘ + Tab. One either has to select it from the iAntiVirus icon in the menu bar or move open windows until it’s found.
[u] Emma also added that resetting the iAntiVirus preference to make it a foreground application only requires one to restart the application and not one’s Mac.[u]
Also, if you want to scan external hard drives, the only option I can see to get that done is to drag and drop the volume onto the iAntiVirus application, which is far from automatic.
Still, iAntiVirus completed its initial scan of my MacBook’s 120GB disc in under 15 minutes (didn’t even find any windows viruses), which isn’t half bad, and that was using “normal” mode versus “fast,” which will do the same job in about two-thirds the time.
Yet another less than optimal feature is scheduling, which only offers weekly, every other day, daily and never. What’s wrong with that? You can’t specify times.
There are free and for pay versions ($29.95) of iAntiVirus with the differences being that the latter offers phone support and dedicated 24/7 support, making it suitable for business and commercial use.
Mac OS X 10.5.x users can download a free copy of iAntiVirus here.
Antivirus applications that offer free trials include:
MacScan 30-day demo (anti spyware application) Sophos Free 30-day trial avast 60-day trial MacAfee Virex (requires registration) Intego VirusBarrier X5 See also:
—Review: VirusBarrier X5
—How to remove OSX.Trojan.iServices.A, iServices.B
Old faithful
ClamXav is open source and free. It’s fully featured (ie easy scheduling and set up) and slow as chilled molasses, but highly rated by users.
What does all that mean? Well, for example, downloaders on MacUpdate have given ClamXav an average rating of 4.5 of 5 stars.
By way of comparison, iAntiVirus only rates 2.5 stars among users on the popular download site.
Also, ClamXav is available for 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard, as well as for 10.3 Panther, making it easily the most broadly Mac compatible AV solution out there.
Conclusions
iAntiVirus is fast and, aside from the fact that it’s free, that’s about the only good thing you can say about this malware scanner from PCTools. It just isn’t very Mac like and lacks certain basic functions, including proper scheduling and the ability automatically scan external volumes.
For its part, ClamXav is really slow, yet otherwise feature complete. It’s not all that Mac like either, but at least everything’s in there.
Got an opinion about antivirus software on the Mac? Share it below in the comments… (characters welcome)!
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May 15th, 2009
I own a licensed copy of Intego VirusBarrier X5 and have replaced it with PCTools iAntiVirus. I have no regrets so far.
iAntiVirus is fast, unobtrusive, and has a small footprint in memory.
I’m not interested in the bloat, slowdown, and false alarms that come with scanning for Windows viruses, trojans, and other forms of Windows malware, so a Mac-only virus database is just what I want.
Nor do I like beating my hard drives to death with scheduled AV scans. The real-time protection is there to catch viruses when they are written to the disk or read from it, so I rarely want to run full system scans.
I agree that the inability to schedule a time of day for the scans is less than optimal. So is the inability to specify which drives are to be included in a scan. It’s somewhat of a mystery as to what it is scanning: Just the boot drive? All internal drives? Drives formatted with a native OS X partition type (e.g., HFS, HFS+)?
The update default of weekly is far too infrequent should a virus start spreading rapidly, so I have bumped that up to daily. As with the scanning, the inability to set a time for the update is not ideal, but is less of an issue *because* I can’t schedule a weekly scan to occur just after a database update.
What I would like:
1. The ability to set time of day for scans and virus database updates.
2. More flexibility to define exactly what will be scanned.
3. The ability to automatically scan new media when it comes online (e.g., plug in an external USB drive).
August 30th, 2009
The problem with ClamXav is not that it’s slow but that it does not detect the most recent malware on Mac OS X.
iAntivirus is better but its UI and User Experience is a complete failure.
September 2nd, 2009
iAntivirus requires Intel based Mac… pffft.