Is it really worthwhile to spend $40 every year to protect a Mac with commercial-grade antivirus software, or to endure the agonizing speed degradation commonly associated with AV? Thanks to Sophos, home users can now have quality protection without these frustrations. In the home environment, however, there are no such requirements, and Mac users have debated for years about whether they should go to the trouble of running antivirus software. The update offers a.Column Tag: Real World Review Real World Review: Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac, Home Edition Enterprise-grade antivirus software, now freeBusinesses are often required by laws and company policies to run antivirus software on all their computers, Macs included. To be safe my wife and I ran our AVs across our iMacs.After changing from a free app to paid four years ago, ClamXav continues to be a popular choice for protecting Macs. As Clamxav website says 'ClamXav is a trusted and highly recommended anti-virus and malware scanner for Mac OS X with the ability to detect both Mac and Windows threats.' Unlike some of the reviews below. 213 Review Questions.It was a Windows trojan so wouldn't have harmed my Mac.In AV-Comparatives' (av-comparatives.org) November 2010 tests of proactive detection of new malware, Sophos Anti-Virus ranked in the top three PC antivirus products, earning the highest certification level (Advanced+). Sophos vs the competitionSophos' antivirus engine is one of the best on the market. (For the full Sophos report, see ). Two Mac-specific threats, OSX/Jahlav-C and OSX/DNSCha-E, were each found on about 1 in every 100 Macs scanned. This malware included both Mac-native threats as well as plenty of Java-based malware, which Sophos pointed out "could easily be adapted to download Mac-based threats," as was the case with Boonana. The announcement came just one week after SecureMac and Intego had independently published information about new Java-based Mac malware spreading through Facebook and other sites, dubbed Boonana by SecureMac and identified as a variant of the Koobface malware by Intego.Two weeks after the release of Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition, Sophos released a report showing that a significant number of Macs running their software had been infected with malware.Like Sophos, ClamXav detects malware designed for any platform, as opposed to Mac-only malware.PC Tools iAntiVirus is only free for home use, and although it does offer on-access scanning, it only detects Mac-specific malware. Although ClamXav does not provide on-access scanning of the whole computer, it can be manually configured to scan files that are downloaded or copied to specific folders, for example ~/Downloads and ~/Desktop. The two most prominent freeware antivirus solutions are ClamXav (clamxav.com) and PC Tools iAntiVirus (iantivirus.com), and each is very different from Sophos.ClamXav is free for anyone to use in any environment, from home computers to enterprise workstations.
![]() Clamxav Review Mac OS X WithRegardless of which option the user chooses, as long as Sophos' on-access scanner is enabled, the file is inaccessible and cannot be opened or even duplicated in the Finder or the Terminal (even using sudo).Figure 2 - When a threat is found, Sophos denies access by defaultIf a malicious Mac application is detected by Sophos, attempting to open the application will result in two Mac OS X dialog boxes informing the user that they can't open the application because it is "not supported on this type of Mac." Thus, Sophos effectively quarantines the files in place.Figure 3 - Malware is not supported on this type of MacEven trying to access quarantined files from another computer via a network share proves fruitless. Instead, Sophos displays an alert informing the user that a threat has been detected, with options to open the Quarantine Manager or close the dialog box, and the latter is the default selection. Neither one detected all the samples, which was expected no antivirus solution detects 100% of infected or potentially dangerous files.Figure 1 - Threat detected by Sophos Anti-Virus EffectivenessUnlike most full-featured antivirus solutions, the default settings of Sophos Anti-Virus do not automatically delete infected files or prompt users to do so. ClamXav only detected about 75% as many files as Sophos, although ClamXav detected some files (particularly Windows adware) that Sophos did not detect. Of the three, only Sophos will detect infected Web pages and e-mail attachments as soon as they are downloaded, regardless of the threat's target platform.I tested Sophos and ClamXav with several hundred samples that I've collected from infected computers, Web sites, and e-mails over the past couple years. For example, the action available for dealing with. AnnoyancesOne strange and annoying issue I've encountered is that Sophos Anti-Virus frequently grays out the Clean Up Threat button for items that should be easy for Sophos to delete on its own. In any case, Sophos quarantines files on the local system in such a way that they cannot be accessed by remote systems. I also tried to duplicate an infected file in-place on the network share, which caused the MacBook Pro's Finder to crash and relaunch (note to self: file a bug report). This resulted in a Mac OS X dialog box explaining that I did not have permission to access the file. From the MacBook Pro I connected to an AFP share on the iMac and tried to copy a file from the iMac to the local hard drive. Okay, so what's the full path?In other cases, instead of Clean up manually the available action will be Restart Mac instead, even when there's absolutely no reason why that should be necessary. You cannot resize the window so there is no way to see the full path, and there is no Show in Finder option either.Figure 4 - "Clean up manually". This may or may not be easy, depending on whether the full path is shown in the Quarantine Manager if the path or file name is too long, the path will be truncated, so you may have to use Spotlight or a third-party search utility to locate the file (refer to the screenshot of the Quarantine Manager). Go fund me for mac and bobIn my testing, there was no noticeable decrease in system speed or usability after installing the Sophos software. SpeedAntivirus suites have a reputation of slowing down computers. Why on earth would Sophos need to restart the computer to clean Windows executables that aren't in use? Worse still, restarting your Mac won't even clean up the threat it will still be there in the Quarantine Manager after restarting.Fortunately, Sophos did not gray out the Clean Up Threat button for the Mac OS X-specific threat I had it scan (a dangerous Space Invaders-style game called lose/lose which deletes files in the user's home directory when you destroy enemy spaceships) no manual deletion or restarting is required to clean that Mac-native threat. ConclusionFor those who support Macs in a home environment, I recommend trying Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorRoshan ArchivesCategories |