The age-old belief in the technological world is that a system running on Macintosh doesn’t get infected by Malware. Although in recent times several occurrences of security breaches have come to light, contradicting the age-old adage to the word. Given, the Macintosh operating system has a lot of in-built tools to counter a malware threat, but is that enough? Which in turn leads us to the next and most important question one has to ask – Is an Antivirus necessary for your Mac?
The Vulnerabilities
As we mentioned, Mac’s do have a varied range of in-built tools to protect the system against a malware infection. For Instance, when an app is downloaded from the internet, the mac checks it against a list of known Malware apps using XProtect. This process keeps working in the background without affecting the operations of the system or slowing it down. Another application, Gatekeeper will prevent the recently downloaded app from opening without the user’s permission, if it hasn’t digitally signed by apple as safe to use. And now, Apple has even started to notarize apps, in order to prove that they are trustworthy.
Apart from the above-mentioned process, all apps present on a Mac system are sandboxed, which means, they can only do what they are meant to do, without being able to access any critical system infrastructure and the settings.
Even with all the security that comes with the operating system, there are still chinks in its armor.
Apple’s layer of security heavily relies on adding a quarantine label on outright malicious software or a suspicious file and then it gives a warning prompt when the user tries to open these apps or files. This process can be exploited given that not all suspicious files or applications are flagged by the system’s internal defenses, which is displayed by applications like a Torrent software. In addition to this, XProtects list of malicious file signatures is hardly as updated as that of an potent Antivirus software. The application only looks for a handful of strains of malware.
Apple also enlightened its patrons about the operating system’s new line of defense that is titled as Catalina. With Catalina embedded in the OS, apps will now require the user’s permission to access their documents, desktop files, iCloud drive, and external drives. The app also promises a higher level of security due to a dedicated system volume for the operating system and T2 security chips in for new Mac enabled machines.
It is yet to be seen on how Catalina performs when the system is under attack from various sources. The current app, gatekeeper, still does not perform a security check on non-quarantined apps at launch, which means a legitimate app could be tampered with by a malicious actor and the operating system would still allow it to run on the operating system.
Detecting the Weak Link
The common criticism that antivirus’ face is that it puts an unnecessary strain of a Mac enabled machine, slowing it down and adding unwanted bloatware in the process. This might have been arguably true a decade ago, but with the advancements in the field of technology, the criticism does not have much merit.
In today’s era, a Mac can perform smoothly even with an Antivirus software running in the background. Yet, Mac users disagree and call it an instant failure if the performance of their system lags even for a few seconds and are quick to discard the idea of an Antivirus software even though internal Mac apps do a poor job at detecting Adware and potentially unwanted programs.
If a victim falls for a malware, it’s likely to be due to human error than due to the presence of a traditional Antivirus. This states the obvious, us humans are fallible in nature and are open to manipulation, which is often exploited by hackers and threat actors.
Having a multi-pronged approach –
The obvious conclusion to this situation is having an Antivirus Software installed on a Mac system, which is lighter on the system. Consequently, we suggest using eScan’s Antivirus for Mac since, it protects the system against unwanted ads and applications, malware attacks, unauthorized users and keeps data secure from keyloggers.
However, it’s not the only prerequisite we suggest, in addition, we also suggest end-users to educate themselves on the evolving threats in the digital world. Ensure no unwanted links are clicked via emails or from sites that ask you to download and install an adobe flash player or similar apps.
Saying that an efficient and fast antivirus can keep a Mac system safe, helping to cover ground that’s missed by other apps.
This concludes the discussion as we arrive at a conclusion, that an Antivirus is indeed necessary for a Mac enabled machine.
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