Best anti-virus SW for OSX 10.6.8

There is no such thing as 'good' antivirus software for OS X, much less 'best'... About the only thing even remotely 'good' is ClamXAV. No idea if they're still supporting 10.6. 10.6 is pretty much obsolete, considering it's now 6 major versions behind.

You can download 10.11 directly from the Mac App Store since your machine is not capable of running Sierra.

ClamXav v2 still supports OS X 10.6.8+ and will continue to do so until v3 is released (no projected date). I'm not aware of any other current A-V software that still does.

That being said, those pop-ups about being infected are not due to anything on your Mac. They are just javascripts run from the site you visit (probably from one of their advertisers). They are always a scam as there is no way to detect an infection from the Internet. Never call any numbers or download anything they recommend. If the popup keeps coming back, even after re-launching your browser, simply hold down the <Shift>-key when launching the browser to prevent it from opening any previous windows and tabs.

The caveat with 10.11.6 is once Apple stops offer securities patches then it will only be as safe as Apple left it.

Many "Windows" virus essentially target a very select group of flaws in Windows, and new variants with new names will often try to do the same. It's unknown what a "Mac" virus would do or try to in the event one is developed and released into the wild. All Mac AV programs have never been faced with an actual OS X virus variant so their ability to deal with it is entirely unknown. What is known is a cursory glance of these forums have shown most if not all of these products can cause mild to incredibly serious issues. If your system begins to behave like a virus the first place you should look to resolve it is complete removal of the Anti-Virus package that history causes a number of conflicts with Apples own (non-disclosed) securities patches or OS X or both.

JimmyCMPIT wrote:

Well they weren't OS X virus, because there still aren't any.

As I'm sure you realize, the OP was referring to malware removal and there are almost 90,000 such files that can impact macOS/OS X and their applications.

So here are a couple of tips about all that.

Any infection name with"Osx" in it was macOS/OS X unique malware and probably included most of that Adware. If the name contained "Win" then it almost certainly was Windows only. There are several other names that might show up, but those require further investigation to know just how they might affect you.

Your 30-day demo started when you installed ClamXav, so even if you remove it today and need to re-install it later, it will probably stop working in 30 days and you will need to purchase it from the ClamXav Store before you can use it again. There have been a couple of occasions where an update provided major improvements and the 30 days was restarted, but don't count on that.

The only background process that runs all the time is ClamXav Sentry which watches your home folder (or anywhere else you elect). That will catch all downloads, e-mail and browser caches that introduce new files onto your drive. Since you don't have an ancient computer, you probably won't even notice it's running, but if you do or feel you don't need that protection, simply disable the feature to "Launch ClamXav Sentry when you log in to this computer" in ClamXav Preference->Sentry. If you can then afford the disk space to keep it and only use it when you suspect something, then you can avoid having to re-install it.

I'm curious as to where you get that number. If you can back it up with credible evidence it would be something I'd be interested in looking into. In the mean time the Safe Mac website puts it a 51, but indexing stopped in 2014 so between November 2014 and now your estimate would state over 89, 949 new Mac malware variants appeared.

http://www.thesafemac.com/mmg-catalog/

I can't vouch for the 90,000 number, but keep in mind that the count on my old site was malware, while the most prevalent threats on a Mac today are adware and potentially unwanted programs (PUPs). There are still very few malware threats for the Mac, but there are tens or hundreds of thousands of threats out there in the other categories on the Mac, depending on how you're counting.

That's the number of macOS/OS X unique signatures in the database that ClamXav checks for today. As Thomas mentioned, most are adware today and variations that are being posted daily. I believe the primary source of the samples is VirusTotal.

Those exploits require physical access to the device. Not to mention the fact that they have already been patched. So... if the CIA broke into your home and compromised your machine... well, you have bigger problems than whether your computer has been 'bugged'.

Glad things have improved for you and happy to have helped.

Well they weren't OS X virus, because there still aren't any.