Mac antivirus tests

There are quite a few antivirus applications for Mac and with malware on the rise it’s about time you pick one and get protected. At AppleSerialNumberInfo.com in August 2012 more than 27 antivirus applications for Mac were tested and reviewed, the most extensive and complete testing done for Mac on this topic to date at that time. Due to the number of available applications, frequent updates and increase in malware, they were no longer able to keep it as up to date as they wanted. SecuritySpread was asked to take over and do all future updates. While I will no longer review every application for performance, interface etc, I will keep the detection results as up to date as possible with monthly testing. The latest results can be found here.

Comments and feedback are welcome!

Menu:
• History of Mac malware
• Malware used in testing
• Detection Rate Results
• Testing methodology

A few recognitions:

First off a huge thank you to AppleSerialNumberInfo.com who laid the groundwork for this project and entrusting it to me now, allowing me to host and update it from now on.

A huge thank you to VirusShare.com who provided me with a ton of samples and saved me a lot of time.

A thank you goes out to VirusTotal for allowing me the access I needed to gather samples that allowed me to do the detailed write-ups about each malware family. These write-ups will be online at some point. (Samples collected from VirusTotal were not used in the antivirus tests but their service wás used to verify the validity of some samples collected from other sources).

Thank you Mila / Contagiodump for providing samples and information on malware. Samples, useful info and references can be found on this site, be sure to check it out.

A thank you goes out to SellYourMac.com who provided me with the PowerMac G5 i needed to continue testing and provide results for the PowerPC users still out there.

The next thank you is to all the individuals that supplied me with samples.

And a special thank you to my beautiful wife for her patience and who has not seen much of me since I started this project. I’ll be down for dinner… sometime tonight honey i promise!