Do you need Anti virus for a MacBook Air?

Hi,

Absolutely not. Your Mac has security built into the system but you should make sure that Gatekeeper is enabled to avoid malware.

Help here >> OS X: About Gatekeeper - Apple Support

Third party anti virus software will slow your Mac down substantially and possibly corrupt the hard drive.

Just enjoy your Mac!

You wasted your time installing any AV software. The site you went to through Google simply redirected you to another site where the entire idea was to get you to install a fake Flash update. Had you simply deleted the fake Flash download instead of installing it, you wouldn't have needed to do anything else. Never, ever install Flash from anywhere other than directly from Adobe.

No MalwareBytes didn't stop it, nor would any AV software because like virtually all Mac malware to date, it was a Trojan. Which is software you choose to install. No AV software can know what it is until you run it. And it is of course too late, then.

I downloaded an app from the App Store to get rid of malware to no avail.

All AV software, in particular from the App Store, is completely useless.

Get rid of Bitdefender. It will not help you one bit. If you install another Trojan, it will go right through. Keep MalwareBytes for Mac. It's job is not preventative (mostly), but to clean up after the fact. The full version of MBAM does two main things in real time: it checks for updates and installs them automatically, and it watches for ransomware activity. When it sees an app trying to encrypt files, MBAM will do what it can to shut down the app as quickly as possible. Notice even that is "after the fact". It can't know a Trojan you installed is ransomware until it's active.

After 7 years of using a MacBook Pro, with regret I had to install an antivirus a few day ago, I have the intention of learning Python programming and for that reason I was googling about the best software for that matter, then my screen suddenly was redirected to another website where I was asked to install flash. By the way, I stopped using flash many years ago. I had Malware Bytes installed and it did nothing to stop that, I downloaded an app from the App Store to get rid of malware to no avail. Finally, I installed Bitdefender and it detected and stopped the redirection to those websites which asked to install a new version of Flash. As I mentioned, after all these years that never happened, so I did a clean install and the first thing I installed this time was the antivirus.

Does the same thing go for MacBook Pro too? I just bought one but I am unsure if I should download a anti-virus protection on it.