All other settings were left at their default values. Each time, any on-access or background scanning features (if any) were disabled, to prevent interference with controlled testing. All testing was done within a three-day time period, from November 11 to November 13, 2012.Īnti-virus software was downloaded, one at a time, and installed on the base system. All testing was done from a mid-2010 17″ MacBook Pro, while booted from this base system rather than from the internal hard drive. No third-party software was installed on this base system. The resulting base system was also saved to a disk image on another volume, to allow for easy restoration to its original state, should that prove necessary.
Testing was done on a base OS X 10.8.2 system, installed freshly on a 30 GB volume on an external hard drive and updated fully. It is important to note that every malware sample used for testing either was already in the VirusTotal database or has been added to it during testing, and is therefore easily accessible to security companies that choose to look for it. Although it was important to have a large enough sampling to achieve a fair test, some effort was made to ensure that biases were not introduced.
#BITDEFENDER VIRUS SCANNER FOR MAC FREE 10.6.8 FOR MAC OS X#
MethodsĪ selection of 51 different malware samples for Mac OS X was collected, representing 19 different malware programs, from a variety of sources. This document will attempt to answer the question of how accurate Mac anti-virus software is at detecting malware. There are hundreds of thousands or millions of different malware programs for Windows, while on the Mac there are only around 33 (by my current count), most of which are “extinct” at this point in time. It has been speculated by some that Mac anti-virus software may not suffer the same problem. Studies have shown that Windows anti-virus programs do not detect more than 90% of all malware at best.
November 14th, 2012 at 9:03 AM EST, modified
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