Popular security utilities for OS X put to the test
Even though the prevalence of threats for the Mac remains relatively minimal, malware on OS X has raised its ugly head a bit in the past few years. Some in the Mac community have been affected by threats such as the Flashback malware, DNSChanger, and the MacDefender Trojan, among others. As a result, while the most effective way of keeping a Mac secure is to follow safe browsing and computing practices, you may also be considering using anti-malware utilities. But which ones perform best?
Recently, Mac security analyst Thomas Reed attempted to tackle this question in part by putting a number of popular antivirus utilities to the test. To do so, Reed took a collection of 128 malware samples that included both recent active malware threats and extinct threats, and ran a number of popular antivirus utilities to see how they managed this collection. Arguably, the sample size of 128 might not be enough to give a complete assessment of these programs' capabilities, but it should be adequate enough for comparative purposes.
