Intego Antivirus

Windows Viruses do not infect Mac OS X. If you want a Windows anti-Virus, install it on Windows, not on the Mac side.

It is worse than useless on the Mac side. It slows things down and does not find anything useful to you.

I am not aware of any free versions of Intego's VirusBarrier product. They used to have a free version in the App Store, but that was discontinued and is no longer available. Further, Intego is a Mac-only company. There is no Windows version of any of Intego's products.

What exactly did you download, and from where?

Unlike many people on the forums, I am an advocate of running an Anti-Virus app on your Mac. I have tested many of the different AV apps that are out there with some of the latest Malware that is spreading on the web.

Intego although its designed for Mac when I tested it with a Malware called vsearch, it detected the Malware but it also locked up the Mac forcing me to restart. I tried this several times with the same results.

If you want a good all around Anti Virus app to use that will help protect your Mac as well as insure that you dont pass on infected files to others that are using Windows I recommend using avast! Free Anti Virus for Mac (http://www.avast.com). I run this on my Macs and it does not seem to slow down any of the software that I use.

Okay, that makes a little more sense now.

Intego's software features the best detection of Mac malware on the market. See the results of my testing in January:

Mac anti-virus testing 2014

However, it's important to understand that those results only measure one thing. Intego's software is often implicated on these forums in crashes, performance problems and blocked functionality (like the inability to download from the App Store). For those reasons, I tend not to recommend using it.

Note that I would also recommend against Avast, which kevin_ has recommended. It has good detections as well, and doesn't seem to have a serious problem with performance or stability, but it does have a very serious problem with false positives. It frequently identifies legitimate files - sometimes even components of the system - as malicious. If you use Avast and allow it to quarantine or delete such files, you could end up in a bit of trouble.

My advice would be to read my Mac Malware Guide. It will help you to understand how to protect yourself. If you choose to use anti-virus software, it will help you understand the roles and limitations of that software, and has some recommendations. It's important to keep in mind that all anti-virus software has drawbacks of some kind, and no anti-virus software can come anywhere close to guaranteeing protection.

(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.)

In case it's not clear, all commercial "anti-virus" products are completely worthless and should not be used under any circumstances. There is no reason for anyone to use any of them, ever.

I was trying to decide on screen size and Mac Air vs Macbook Pro, recently and so worked on my old (10.5) 15" Macbook Pro for a few days. I trade online and am trading mostly options due to market volatility, so I am in my account for hours at a time. A window appeared with an Adobe update which I quickly downloaded so I could access my advanced trading platform. Fortunately I had renewed my Intego subscription and it caught one of the new banking Trojans which was masquerading as an Adobe update. Flash Trojan, I think? They transfer money out of your bank/investment account...

But if you are not doing anything related to your finances, then you can fix the problems later, if your Mac starts crashing or whatever.

More:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/01/its-alive-once-prolific-flashback-trojan -still-infecting-22000-macs/

i-and. wrote:

it caught one of the new banking Trojans which was masquerading as an Adobe update.

What trojan is that?

There are no current banking trojans that affect the Mac. Thus, either you misinterpreted a result as a "banking trojan" when it really isn't, or Intego caught an attempt to download a Windows banking trojan (which would not be a threat to your Mac).

Also, regarding your second post, Flashback is extinct. There has not been a new Flashback infection in quite some time now. The remaining infections mentioned in that article you refer to are Macs that were infected back when Flashback was still active, and that haven't installed a single update since. (A system update released for all affected systems removed Flashback infections and eliminated the vulnerable versions of Java that made the infection possible.)

For the benefit of us 'newbies' ........

Is there a simple check folk may make which will confirm that no malware has infected their Apple computer?

Apple machines HAVE been infected in the past. 😟

For the benefit of us 'newbies' ........

Is there a simple check folk may make which will confirm that no malware has infected their Apple computer?

Just an under-informed opinion & anecdotal comment:

There is hype to say that you must be “proactive” & run virus checkers, etc.

I don’t know if that’s more of the slap fight over whether Macs are impervious, or not.

Consider: if you never run on the internet or load any software, from any source - its probably even more impervious!

If you never put financial info on your computer, do your taxes electronically (good luck with that) or put personal information on a computer - it won’t matter so much if you are hacked, anyway. But that’s not there way the world works.

The fact that things are spinning & show cryptic feedback no one can make sense of, can be a vague comfort.

Its as though feedback graphics can never be simple enough, not thorough enough to be of much use.

Runs Fine: Intego Virusbarrier & Its Netbarrier Firewall runs fine. It can run over the top of your Apple Firewall. I presume that makes it additive.

This is based upon a newer mac loaded with all the RAM the configuration can take. There is a lot of other crap that gets loaded onto machines which are probably a bigger pain. (I recently scrubbed some of those off mine: Everybody makes utilities that are part of a sales pitch & bundle deal. To feel you got your money’s worth, you load them, even if you don’t use them).

What it protects against: I don’t know if there are infections that are likely.

Some of the things that muck up your computer are not viruses, per se & that may enter into the argument.

You aren’t supposed to run Java or Flash, because they are Swiss Cheese, but some people do. Does anything protect against those well?

Do you need it?: I sure can’t say. I do like that people respond with a firm opinion. Link doesn’t hedge!

Do you have a Mac-only household?

No statistics whether it works well or not, because I have only rarely discovered things that are malicious on a mac in decades.

Nearly all [I’ve] found across macs were Windows-related exploits & did not even activate on a mac, but that’s a sample size of a couple dozen. Viruses DO occasionally show up even if intended for Windows & not everyone runs a mac, so maybe you are helping keep that dufus brother-in-law who constantly crashes running, safe as a service to mankind.

Thomas_r has taken pains to provide some corroboration for his opinion. Wish we had more.

But that’s just my opinion, without corroboration: Nobody seems to know.

Hi Thomas.

If I can glom on & balloon the conversation a tiny bit:

On your site, you have a useful guide people should visit. You also mention keeping ALL software up to date as a caveat.

I find that’s just not realistic: If you mean keeping EVERY application absolutely current - means purchasing upgrades incessantly & a growing software maintenance budget.

While some triage may be called for to remove applications stored & rarely, or never used:

perhaps someday killing off their older version of Photoshop that has java components... It doesn’t seem likely to me that many people do that.

I would think that even Appstore purchases fall under this same condition:

Sometime, it just doesn’t seem like the next new app upgrade gets one enough bells & whistles to make it worth the additional cost.

Nothing ever warns us the old stuff may be susceptible.

HunterBD wrote:

Apple machines HAVE been infected in the past. 😟

Certainly. None of those things are currently a threat, however, and none of them were detected by anti-virus software until they were discovered.

Is there a simple check folk may make which will confirm that no malware has infected their Apple computer?

No. If you were infected with malware, it would be brand new, unknown malware, and thus it would not be detected by anti-virus software. So there's nothing you can scan with to detect it. The best way to stay safe and avoid being infected is to exercise caution about anything you open on your computer, and avoid things that modify browser behavior (like Java or Flash) whenever possible. I've been doing that with Macs since the very first Mac malware appeared decades ago, and I've never once been infected with anything.

See my Mac Malware Guide for details.

(Fair disclosure: I may receive compensation from links to my sites, TheSafeMac.com and AdwareMedic.com.)