For many years, Mac owners scoffed at the idea of installing antivirus protection. Viruses? Malware? Those are Windows problems, right? Wrong. While it's true that Windows is a much more popular target for malware coders, macOS devices aren't as invulnerable as some might think. If you don't want to spend money on antivirus protection for your Mac, consider installing the free Sophos Home Free (for Mac). It's extraordinarily simple, and it does well in testing. To get started with Sophos, you register for an online account. Once you've confirmed your email, you can install and manage protection on three devices, macOS or Windows, and your subscription never expires. When I reviewed the previous version of this product, it offered 10 licenses. With the current version, if you want 10 licenses you must spring for the new Sophos Home Premium (for Mac). Note, though, that users of the free product get premium features for the first 30 days. Installation on my test Apple MacBook Air 13-Inch went very quickly. Within a minute or two, the product was ready to use, including all the latest antivirus signature updates. View All 8 Photos in Gallery As with Sophos Home Free on Windows, all configuration takes place in the online dashboard. Since my last review of this product, its user interface has gotten even simpler. Its icon appears in the menu bar at the top of the screen. Clicking it brings up a tiny window that reports your protection status, with a menu that lets you launch a scan, manage your devices, check for updates, and set preferences. Choosing device management or preferences sends you to the online dashboard. Unlike the Windows product, on the Mac version clicking for a scan defaults to a fast scan, with an option to perform a full scan if the product alerts you to a problem. The fast scan finished in less than a minute, reporting no problems. That's it. The main window that I saw in the previous version is gone. This version is impressively streamlined and low-key. Pricing and OS Support Mac users often justify skipping antivirus protection on the basis that there just isn't a lot of Mac malware. Why spend money on something you might not need? But Mac malware is on the rise, and you can install Sophos at no charge, as long as you're not using it in a commercial setting. Avira Free Antivirus for Mac is also free, with no restrictions, and no requirement to even register. Commercial Mac antivirus pricing is generally just under $40 per year for a single license. Half of the current products fit that model, and most of those give you three licenses for $59.99 per year. With McAfee AntiVirus Plus (for Mac), that $59.99 subscription price gets you not three licenses but unlimited licenses. You can install it on all the macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS devices in your household. My experience has been that Mac users are more likely to keep their operating systems fully updated than their Windows-loving counterparts. Even so, not everyone has the very latest macOS Sierra installed. Like Malwarebytes for Mac Premium, Sophos supports older versions back to Yosemite (10.10). That's a change since the previous edition, which went all the way back to Mountain Lion (10.8). Avira, also free, requires at least El Capitan (10.11), the toughest OS requirement of my current collection of Mac antivirus products. Online Dashboard and Content Filter As noted, clicking Manage Devices or Preferences from the Sophos widget's menu takes you to the online dashboard. You can also just log in directly from any browser. The main page lists your protected devices. If you haven't used up all three licenses, you can click Add Device to either install on the device you're using or send a link by email. If you've replaced one of your computers, you can remove it from the dashboard, freeing up that license for reuse. The dashboards for Windows and macOS devices are nearly identical. The Status page displays panels for Antivirus Protection and Web Protection (enabled) plus Ransomware Protection, Privacy Protection, and Malicious Traffic Detection (for paying customers only). Clicking the Configure link in the two available panels opens the Protection page, with the proper sub-page selected. Configuration is simple. On the General sub-page you can turn PUA (Potentially Unwanted Application) detection or all real-time protection on and off. On the Web sub-page you can turn off blacklisting of known malware-hosting sites. Here's one of the few many PCs get more than Macs. On a PC, you get Download Reputation checking, a feature that proved useful in my testing under Windows. Safe Online Banking is also Windows-only, but that's a premium feature. Here's something I didn't expect—there's a simple parental control component built into the dashboard. For each device, you can configure how Sophos will handle almost 30 categories of website content. By default, they're all set to allow access, but you can set it to block matching sites, or to give the child a warning before allowing access. I tried to access several dozen inappropriate sites, and found that the content filter blocked all of them. However, it appears that the content filter can't handle secure (HTTPS) websites. By logging in to a secure anonymizing proxy site, I completely evaded the content filter. The same was true of the similar feature in Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac. Kaspersky offers a full parental control component, with content filtering, internet time scheduling, and more, but it, too, fell victim to a secure anonymizing proxy. The fact that Sophos focuses mainly on businesses makes this dashboard-based configuration system totally logical. In a business, the IT security admin handles antivirus configuration, not the security-ignorant employees. It can also be great for tech-savvy consumers. Instead of having to drive across town to help Uncle Albert with his antivirus, you can handle it all remotely. Good Malware Protection Test Scores If you're looking for a new car, you read about all sorts of safety tests which ones rated best. In the security realm, the independent testing labs are the place to go for such information. Much more test data is available for Windows antivirus utilities, but two of the labs do release test results for Mac on a regular basis. It's a good thing, from my point of view, because few of my own testing techniques carry over to macOS. Previously, Sophos received Mac malware certification from AV-Comparatives, with 100 percent detection in the main Mac malware test. However, in the most recent test report from this lab, Sophos didn't appear. Scores overall were down slightly, with only Bitdefender and Kaspersky managing 100 percent detection of Mac malware. The researchers at AV-Test Institute perform several different tests to rate Mac antivirus. The most important, of course, is a test of Mac malware protection. Like ESET Cyber Security (for Mac) and several others, Sophos scored 100 percent on this test. PUAs aren't necessarily malware, but as the name implies, you probably don't want them around. When challenged with a collection of PUAs, Sophos protected against more than 95 percent. Only Avast, Bitdefender, ESET, and Trend Micro scored higher. As for detecting Windows malware, AV-Test gave Sophos (and several other products) the top score. Scanning and Scheduling As noted, Sophos advises just using the fast malware scan unless the real-time protection system detects malware. Even so, I suggest running one full scan right after installation, to make sure there's nothing lurking. Running that scan with Sophos on my test Mac took 20 minutes, about half the current average and much better than the previous edition. Trend Micro's full scan ran for more than three hours. At the other end of the spectrum, running a full scan with Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus (for Mac) took just two minutes. Not only that, the full scan by Sophos detected some malware lurking in the trash and in cache folders. There's clearly value in that initial full scan. Like Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac and Kaspersky, Sophos doesn't run scans on a schedule. The logic here is that that real-time protection should take care of any nasties that crop up after the initial full scan. Most of the Mac antivirus products I've reviewed also check for Windows malware, to make sure that your Mac doesn't act as a conduit to other devices on the network. I copied my current collection of Windows malware to a USB drive and opened the folder of samples. Sophos started cleaning up right away, stacking up ranks of slide-in notifications. It removed high-risk items immediately, but left lower-risk PUAs for my review. In each case, I clicked a button to clean up the PUA. I would have liked an option to clean them all at once rather than having to go through the process one at a time. The tiny pull-down window got a lot bigger at this point, filled with reports of malware removed and PUA cleanups in progress. For a few items, Sophos recommended manual cleanup, with a button to get instructions. The instructions thoroughly covered situations including malware found in backups, in caches, and in email attachments. In my case, all I needed to do was delete the offending files. Sophos doesn't bother with storing detected malware in quarantine. It strips virus code from infected files and simply deletes other types of malware. You can Control-Click any drive or folder and choose Scan with Sophos Home. Note, though, that at the moment this feature is not working with mounted drives such as USB thumb drives. A fix is expected by the first of March. Excellent Phishing Protection Creating a drive-by download or other web-based malware attack isn't easy, and the payload is almost always platform-specific. Creating a phishing website, on the other hand, is a total breeze. Just build a page that looks exactly like, say, the PayPal login page, and broadcast links to that page in a spam campaign. Each unwitting dupe who logs in to your fake page is another PayPal account you own. And phishing works on any platform, in any browser. Unlike many of the Mac antivirus products I've looked at, Sophos doesn't need to install a browser add-in for protection against malicious and fraudulent URLs. Filtering happens below the browser level, which is certainly convenient. I always use the very newest real-world fraudulent sites in my antiphishing test, gathering several hundred from websites that track such things. A tiny utility that I wrote makes it easy to launch each URL in four browsers at once. Three of those rely on the protection built into Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, while Norton protects the fourth. As for Mac testing, my utility is no help, so I simply copy each URL to the clipboard and paste it into the browser. The fraudsters who create phishing pages are always coming up with new dirty tricks, so rather than report detection rates as hard numbers, I report the difference between the product under testing and the other four. Very few products, whether running on Windows or macOS, can beat Norton. When last tested, Sophos came in just three percentage points behind Norton. This time it was seven points behind, but retained its position in the chart. All three browsers had an unusually good day. Sophos beat Internet Explorer by 10 percentage points, but only tied Chrome and Firefox. Avira, by contrast, fared worse in this test than the three browsers, and much worse than Norton, a full 47 percentage points behind. Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac did better than Sophos in this test, lagging Norton by a single percentage point, and Bitdefender actually beat Norton by five points. The Norton product I use as my touchstone is the long-standing Windows edition; Symantec Norton Security Deluxe (for Mac) fell behind in this test. Tested with the exact same sample set, it scored 14 percentage points below its Windows cousin's detection rate. Free and Easy Sophos Home (for Mac) has pared down antivirus protection to the essential minimum. It does the job, with next to no configuration settings. One of the two independent labs that I follow certifies its protection; the other certified it in a previous test. It did well in my antiphishing test, and detected every single Windows malware sample I threw at it. You can even use it for a simple kind of parental control. Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac and Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac took certification from both labs, however, with top scores across the board. Bitdefender also beat the pack in my antiphishing test. It marks up dangerous links in search results, and defends your documents against ransomware. Kaspersky is a full suite, with network protection, privacy protection, parental control, and more. These two are our Editors' Choice products for Mac antivirus, but if you can't afford them, Sophos Home Free is a reasonable choice. Sophos Home Free (for Mac) Bottom Line: Sophos Home Free (for Mac) keeps configuration to a minimum and gets good scores both in independent lab tests and our own hands-on tests. It's a fine choice for protecting your Macs without spending your hard-earned cash.

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