Looking for some insight into what everyone is using for antivirus. I have AVG a whirl but I experienced some weird stuttering on my M2 MacBook Air, so obviously I want something that is minimally impactful on performance while still being accurate.
Do not install any third-party antivirus software. It’s unnecessary and is itself a massive security risk. You have to literally override the built-in protections in order to allow the antivirus application to scan the other applications and files.
This. And if you really want to install something, I recommend a good adblocker (ads are sometimes a vector for malware distribution)
- Safari: AdGuard (free tier is fine)
- Firefox: uBlock origin
- Chrome: uBlock origin
Even on the windows side you are better off with the 1st party defender features these days.
Enterprise use 3rd party AV for central orchestration and control. Theres no reason for this in consumer land.
The threat detection isn’t meaningfully better across any of them (aside from some being “astonishingly bad”) despite what vendors claim.
The best people to know how to protect your OS are the people that made it.
Malwarebytes antimalware tool is all you’ll ever need, but after 30+ years of working with Macs, I’ve never encountered a single piece of Mac malware in the wild. It’s astoundingly rare. Almost any piece of Mac malware you hear about is proof of concept and exists almost entirely in a lab somewhere. Or, if it does get out of the wild, patches are almost immediately released by Apple that close any vulnerability.
Also, avast is garbage. Get rid of it 
I got a few bits of malware when my kids were about 10 and went few a phase of clicking on ‘free game’ links. MalwareBytes always managed to clear up the stuff - classified as annoyances.
The free version is fine.
Frankly, I find that shocking, but not unbelievable if it happened in the mid-aughts when there was a brief spate of web bugs (mostly harmless) and which Apple patched within days with their own malware removal tools at the time.
But, yeah, Malwarebytes is the gold standard, and the free version is all you need.
That’s the rough timescale, yup.
This. Used malwarebytes to clean a user profile that had a bunch of adware installed on it. Was all I ever needed. The whole system was not compromised, just a single user profile that I didn’t want to bother regenerating.
Been running Malwarebytes on our macs for several years. No detects. Last time I saw a Mac virus was in the days of wdef (late 80s early 90s).
Oh there’s plenty. You’d be surprised how much old people can get and how quickly they can get it again after paying you to clean it off for them. I’ve seen macbooks with 10s of thousands of infections. Malwarebytes is great though.
No
A lot of useful replies. Thanks everyone! I’m going to stick with the built in protections and just be a careful browser.
What is a Virus?
I use the Defender for Endpoint that comes with my Office subscription but I agree that unless you have an organizational EDR solution that can mitigate the fact you have to open up the system permissions to allow system scanning, it’s probably smarter to use ad block on your browser, use only vetted apps, and not override the default security controls.
That being said it’s probably not realistic to only use App Store apps, or keep things 100% locked down. If you are going to open things up. Use a reputable EDR solution and not just some free program like AVG or malwarebytes.
Another vote for not bothering with any antivirus. Uninstall AVG too.
