A Mac does need antivirus, but you can only trust these

One of the great myths within the technology community is that Macs are invulnerable. Although they may be less vulnerable than their competition, the Cupertino computers should still have a security solution up to the task.

AV Test’s security lab has examined 10 protection packages for home Mac users and 4 security solutions for corporate users. With the results in hand, these are the Mac antivirus you should trust.

A Mac does need antivirus, but you can only trust these

Putting Monterey’s Security to the Test

Testing was done in March 2022 under MacOS Monterey version 12.2 . The consumer test included 10 consumer products from Avast, AVG, Avira, Bitdefender, Clario, F-Secure, Kaspersky, Norton, Protected.net and Trend Micro. In addition, 4 solutions for corporate users from Bitdefender, Crowdstrike, Sophos and Trellix were examined.

AV Test MacOS

AV Test macOS

Test results indicate how well security packages and solutions protect against a range of attacks, but not just individual products were tested for protection. Performance and usability were also put to the test. The latter category primarily involves testing for false alarms due to falsely identified threat software. In each test category, a product can accumulate up to 6 points. The maximum achievable score in the test is therefore 18 points, which would indicate being close to perfection as a security solution.

The best antivirus for Mac

Several products earned the full 18 points. Among Mac products for home users, 8 out of 10 achieved full marks, with an additional 2 products scoring an excellent 17.5 points, leaving them close to perfect in the AV Test results.

Protección Mac frente a malware

Mac malware protection

Mac corporate solutions also performed similarly well. Crowdstrike’s solution got the full 18 points and the other three got an excellent score of 17.5 points.

Going into detail about the performance in the protection section, which after all is the most important, among the packages for private users the results of the malware detection test, 8 out of 10 packages did it without errors for all the attackers: Avast, AVG, Avira, Bitdefender, Clario, Kaspersky, Norton and Protected.net. Only Trend Micro had minor problems with detection, achieving an excellent 99 percent, while F-Secure detected 98 percent. Thus, 9 out of 10 packages received the full 6 points and F-Secure scored 5.5 points.

As for enterprise antivirus, Bitdefender and Trellix rejected all attackers 100%. Crowdstrike and Sophos had miniscule problems, each achieving 99.5 percent. The 4 packages, with these results, received the full 6 points in the protection section.