Q: recommend  best mac virus protection

Please read Effective defenses against malware and other threats.

Anything with "clean" or "doctor" in the name should be especially avoided.

The point is, none of those products are capable of providing any benefit. Many of them will cause your Mac to run poorly, or not at all. Some of them are arguably malicious in themselves. The best that can be said of any product available from the Mac App Store is that it won't make a horrendous mess of things. However, a case can be made for the fact they may cause needless concern, will needlessly burden your Mac, and possibly accelerate inevitable hardware failure.

A properly updated OS X installation already includes robust protections against malicious alteration, and any product developer that claims knowledge of it superior to that of Apple's own ought to be regarded with skepticism, if not outright derision. Selling computer security, as a product "in a box" so to speak, is a fraud perpetrated on unsophisticated consumers. The Mac is designed to be used and enjoyed without the need to burden it with such useless, time- and money-wasting junk.

The direct result of using one popular "anti-virus" App Store product is chronicled in this Discussion: Re: threat by trojan.JS.Iframe.BKD on MacBookPro. There are countless other stories of misery on this site. Don't install such garbage to begin with, and you will avoid adding to them.

This site does not accept advertising. It is one of very few websites that don't. That does not stop people from attempting to exploit it to derive personal gain, or from unpaid shills from promoting various products for reasons known only to them.

As I wrote, deliberately modifying a Mac's already inherently secure operating system to allegedly "protect" it from viruses that don't exist is ill-advised. As bad an idea as that would be, connecting a hardware device to a USB port to accomplish that presents even more serious concerns. An effective security strategy includes keeping your Mac physically secure from unauthorized tampering, as well as prohibiting remote access to it from anyone you don't know or trust.

Nearly all products finding a "Trojan" or similar piece of malware on a Mac identify things that can affect only a Windows PC, and are completely inert on a Mac. They can arrive via spam or other emails that should either be ignored or deleted. Problems arise when a user grants permission for that product to eradicate or "quarantine" the alleged infection, resulting in corrupting the Mail app's database. Then, the user wonders why Mail is not launching properly, or is causing the spinning wait cursor (beachball) to make a frequent appearance. Then, the typical reaction is to download and install even more worthless garbage to fix that problem.

That's just one example of the miseries that can befall users placing blind trust in third party product claims to "protect" their Macs, to keep them "clean", or to fix mysterious problems. If those users are fortunate, they eventually come to this site complaining of random crashes and related performance problems that require time-consuming procedures toward undoing damage the user brought upon himself by using such things. Or, they can choose to pay Apple a modest fee to fix things for them.

If they're really unfortunate, they risk becoming defrauded by countless scam artists leveraging Google search results to prey on unsophisticated computer users. After all, if they were knowledgeable they wouldn't have found themselves in that unfortunate situation to begin with.

If you want to burden your computer with totally worthless "anti-virus" and "security" products despite the information I already presented, perhaps the Mac isn't for you. Get a Windows PC instead.

You can download literally thousands of Trojans onto your Mac. Nothing will

ever happen to your Mac because they can't run on your Mac. Nothing will prevent you from downloading them.

XProtect, built into the OS, blocks all known trojans that would affect your Mac.

The last known Trojan for OS X was years ago. So, there is really no way that you downloaded a Mac Trojan.

The found Trojan was either a false positive or a Windows Trojan.

There are no viruses in the wild that can affect OS X. There is malware in the form of adware, etc. but those require active participation by the user to install and none of them would do anything like what you describe.

Please download and install EtreCheck from http://etrecheck.com/

Run it and post the report here.

Chris Berry wrote:

 

That's really useful to know,

Any idea what caused my mac to randomly select emails and delete them, and the same with text in Word?

I assumed it was a virus that was causing this?

Do you have a Wacom tablet? There have been reports of flakey behavior here and there. I don't think it has ever deleted anything.

Viruses don't delete emails and text in word processors. There is no utility in advertising the fact that you have infected a host. They hide in the background and turn your computer into a zombie for use in mass attacks or collect personal information to sell.

Allan has posted a way to check what you have installed on your Mac.