Has anyone used Malwarebytes or anything similar to protect Mac from virus etc

I have tried. But, I'm not sure if it was the right thing to do.

There is nothing wrong with running MalwareBytes for Mac. Apple's own Genius staff uses and recommends it. Apple's phone support also will send users to the site to download and run MB for Mac.

I think I was speaking with Mac support, but how do I know?

How could you not know? You called them at the support number listed on this site. Right?

General U.S. number
1-800-275-2273

iPhone
1-800-MY-IPHONE
(1-800-694-7466)

Education customers
Support: 1-800-800-2775
Sales: 1-800-780-5009

Enterprise
1-866-752-7753

Accessibility and assistive technology
1-877-204-3930

I'm just back from the Mac store in Des Moines where they ran Malwarebytes on my MacBookAir and removed about 12 problem files. It was quick and efficient. The program is not resident but has to be run from time to time, which is what I prefer anyway. It's free on the web and I recommend it especially for malware you might collect with normal browsing.

I had to come back and say thank you for this thread. Malwarebytes seriously made my Mac a much healthier computer. I cannot tell you how many issues it was having and after running Malwarebytes once it's working like a champ! Quite as a mouse and smooth. Thanks!

If you have an up-to-date Mac OS X with all security patches you have the best protection already installed. Most AV software and malware software is a waste of time and money, will slow down the system and some of it will damage the system.

Absolutely avoid Norton, McAfee, MacKeeper, cleaners and all associated software...once they are installed they are extremely difficult to remove.

An excellent resource to read is: https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-2435

DO NOT INSTALL ANY ANTIVIRUS OR ANYTHING THAT CLAIMS TO "CLEAN" OR 'TUNE-UP" YOUR MAC!

Also, DO NOT INSTALL AN APP CALLED "MACKEEPER"!

OS X works fine on its own and can.handle its own security and maintenance tasks without any other so called help of third party apps.

I would disagree a bit with the others. Although it's true that there's a lot of bad anti-virus software out there - some of it bad to the degree that it should be considered a scam - not all of it is bad.

Whether it's necessary is another question. There have been some holes in the armor of Mac OS X lately, so although it does protect you from a lot, that protection is far from perfect.

For some more reading on these topics, see:

Mac Malware Guide

Time to re-evaluate safety of Mac OS X

(Fair disclosure: The Safe Mac is my site, and contains a Donate button, so I may receive compensation for providing links to The Safe Mac. Donations are not required.)

there are some free ones and paid ones in osx app store those will likely not harm

and could find spyware and addware but virus's are not really present on osx

but most people dont understand the differences between the various types which is also irrelevant I suppose

Not to name anyone specifically in this thread, but what I always wonder about when someone (or a group of someones piling on in like fashion) comes in saying the usual about up to date Macs not needing A-V, and/or how worthless, or even destructive it is, is have they had any first hand experience with it, or are they just reflexively repeating what they've heard others say. In other words, do they really know what they're talking about? Obviously meant as a rhetorical question.

Absolutely, if you have an up to date Mac you have nothing to worry about. Unless of course someone gives you an up to date Mac that has malware on it, in which case this is the worst possible answer since not only do you shrug off the possibility of a Mac getting malware, you also assert that malware tools are useless and should never be installed. I came here looking for alternatives to Malwarebytes or Spybot S&D so I can figure out which software is malicious on this laptop rather than having to manually google every single application in the Applications folder just to find out what's causing a ton of pop ups directing me to "MacKeeper."

If anyone has any useful answers this would definitely be a great place to put them...

If someone gives you a Mac, or you buy one second-hand, the first thing you should do is erase the hard drive and reinstall a fresh system. If the system is infected with actual malware, there is no tool that exists that can reliably find and clean up the mess.

In your case, it sounds like you may just have adware, which is more easily removed. However, I'd still recommend erasing the hard drive and starting fresh, unless the "second-hand Mac" scenario was just rhetorical and is not actually related to your case.

I should have been more specific, I wasn't given a Mac to keep, I was given a Mac to clean up. I have almost 20 years experience working with personal computers and I've worked on every major OS that's been released during that time (OS/2, every version of Windows since 3.1, Linux, Mac OS, Unix). I no longer work in a shop specifically fixing computers but my family still gives me their computers to look at whenever they have issues. My cousin just gave me her laptop since she was unable to fill out any web forms that would try to verify her e-mail address, plus she kept getting pop ups to run some MacKeeper software. Had this been a computer I received second hand I would have re-installed the OS regardless of the state it was on, but since she needs the files on her computer for school I figured it'd be much easier to run a Mac OS equivalent of Malwarebytes than to backup everything and re-install the OS.

Unfortunately when you search the internet for a Malwarebytes alternative for Mac OS, the majority of the time you just get posts from people saying "Macs are super secure, don't worry about it you won't get infected", which is a completely useless response for someone whose computer is infected. The rest of the posts responding to people who ARE infected are much like your response "Just re-install the OS" but that doesn't address the underlying issue of what's infecting the computer for those people who can't afford to lose everything. I was eventually able to Google the symptoms of this issue and determine that it was a trojan known as DownLite or VSearch. Once I found where it was located I opened up a terminal, ran sudo su to elevate myself to root, deleted the VSearch folder and files from the terminal, ran ps ax | grep VSearch to find the running application and did a kill -9 [pid] to terminate the app (rather than rebooting.)

Once that was all done I was able to use Chrome and Safari without all of the popups and hijacks. It took all of 5 minutes once I knew what the underlying issue was but I was really hoping to find a program like Malwarebytes so I could just let it scan the computer and tell me "These applications are malicious..." especially since my cousin installed a lot of stuff I would consider junk on her laptop and I didn't want to delete things that are just harmless junk (since she might use them.) Since I ended up having to do this all manually I'm just hoping there's nothing else lingering on the computer that didn't have visible symptoms.

Tada: http://www.adwaremedic.com/index.php

(Made by thomas_r.)

In that case, the issue with your cousin's computer was adware, not malware. Subtle difference, but it's there, and it means that most adware is not well detected by most anti-virus software, and I'm not aware of any anti-virus software that will fully clean up all the debris, if any, left by an adware infection.

For adware, it is completely possible to remove all the components without resorting to erasing the hard drive. See my Adware Removal Guide, or my AdwareMedic app, for future reference. It's important to remember, though, that these are specific to adware, and do not provide any methods for removing actual malware. That's less easy... some malware is easy to remove, other malware not so much. Depends on whether there are backdoors involved and how well documented the malware is. Thus the recommendation for erasing the hard drive in cases where actual malware is involved, or with second-hand Macs in an uncertain state.

(Fair disclosure: I may receive compensation from links to my sites, TheSafeMac.com and AdwareMedic.com, in the form of buttons allowing for donations. Donations are not required to use my site or software.)

Thank you thomas_r for creating the Adwaremedic software and Esquared for suggesting it, I wish the answer could be updated to highlight an actual response rather than the "Don't worry about it" answer that was originally accepted. I couldn't find quite the community response in terms of software recommendations for cleaning out a Mac as I could for cleaning out a Windows PC so I didn't know which software to trust (obviously since there's a lot less malicious software out there on Macs.) The term malware encompasses all malicious software including adware, viruses, spyware and the like, which are all found by software like Malwarebytes. I generally don't like to run AV software like Norton or McAfee since they tend to dig in deeper into a computer and cause more problems than the malware itself and they hardly ever find anything that I'm trying to remove. I very rarely ran into any malicious software that required a format and re-install to completely remove, and on a Unix based system like Mac OS X there should be nothing that requires a format and re-install, it's just a matter of how much time do you want to spend trying to save the OS.