Do Apple products need anti virus software?

In General 3rd Party AV Software is Not Required as Mac OS X tends to look after itself.

Read Here > https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4545776?tstart=0

See Here > Antivirus Discussion

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4724387?answerId=20969069022#20969069022

The Safe Mac > http://www.thesafemac.com/mmg/

Kajones1 --

Comcast "offers" that stuff to all their customers, assuming that all of them are PC users. They know nothing about Macs, and apparently are not interesting in acknowledging us. I am a Comcast customer, and they have tried to foist Norton and McAfee on me several times. Ignore it. Either one of those will do nothing but slow down your Mac, and scare you with constant false positive reports.

Comcast tried it with me as well - I've now dropped them (for other reasons).....

(edited to delete an already posted link)

Pretty blunt, you may feel, but ... NO

because apple software has built in security features there is no need to have antivirus software on a mac. making a strong password for your email acct will prevent anyone from being able to compromise it. the mac itself should be fine though

Just for full disclosure, there are a handful of malware pieces out there. Also, "virus" is not the correction common definition. A virus is a particular type of unwanted, or damaging software. The more recent all encompassing term is malware, which is short for "malicious software".

1. Viruses - Zero. Not a single virus of any kind has been found in the wild that affects the Mac OS.

2. Worms - One long dead worm that reportedly infected less than 100 computers.

3. Trojans - These are the most common (and there aren't a lot of them). They attempt to trick you installing them by pretending to be something else. They can't self replicate like a virus. Each infection requires the user's help to get it installed.

4. Java attacks - These were the most recent. It was the first attack to successfully infect the Mac OS simply by visiting an infected web site. No user interaction was necessary. The easy fix was to turn Java off in your web browser. Leave JavaScript on. Despite the similar name, they have nothing to do with each other.

Java, and the Mac OS have since been updated against these attacks, and the writers of these attacks apparently haven't been able to find a way around these patches. There have been no such attacks for over a year.

Basically, the Mac needs no help. Those who do run AV software, or are required to (business office, school systems, etc.) are there to help catch the myriad of Windows malware that gets passed around. For the Mac in such situations, you're really just catching Windows malware that comes to you in the form of an email attachment so you don't unknowingly forward them to Windows users.