Editors’ Note: PCMag rates and evaluates all products based on their merits and effectiveness, not on any political or other considerations. However, due to the increasing censure and criticism of Kaspersky by US government agencies, foreign agencies, and informed third parties, we no longer recommendno longer recommend Kaspersky products. Because we have not found any hard evidence of misdeeds on the part of Kaspersky, however, we continue to evaluate and report on the company's products for those who wish to decide for themselves.Every macOS antivirus utility must handle the essential tasks of scanning for existing malware and preventing any future malware attacks. Some stop there, while others offer a little more security—or a lot more. Kaspersky Standard for Mac offers more, but not as much as its predecessor Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac. Yes, Kaspersky introduces an entirely new product line this year, going from Kaspersky Standard, reviewed here, to Kaspersky Plus and Kaspersky Premium, with additional features at each upgrade.It’s true that the US government flags Kaspersky as a Russian security risk, but that designation has no bearing on Kaspersky’s product line makeover. The new products were almost ready for release when the war in Ukraine began in February. Now that the release has arrived, Kaspersky will roll out these new products gradually, so the old and new products will coexist for a few months.Kaspersky the company and its eponymous founder Eugene Kaspersky contend that the US is wrong, and that Kaspersky software is in no way a security risk. They point out that the company, while originally Russian, is now wholly international, with data centers based in Switzerland. In this and coming reviews, I’ll stick to evaluating the products on their merits, though we at PCMag have determined not to award any Kaspersky products our Editors’ Choice honor.How Much Does Kaspersky Standard for Mac Cost?Just as with antivirus for Windows, the most common price to protect one Mac for a year is just under $40. For example, Mac antivirus tools from Bitdefender, ESET, and Webroot all cost $39.99 per year. At $47.99 per year for a single license, Kaspersky Standard seems a bit more costly, but the more licenses you need, the better it looks.Stepping up to a three-device subscription the most common price is just under $60. That’s what you pay for Bitdefender, ESET, and Total Defense Essential Anti-Virus for Mac, for example. At this level, Kaspersky is a slightly better deal, $56.99 per year for a three-pack. When you get to five licenses, Kaspersky has the best price, $65.99 per year. Other five-license subscriptions range from $71.95 for G Data to $104.99 for Norton 360 Deluxe (for Mac). To be fair, Norton is a full cross-platform suite, and your subscription includes five no-limits VPN licenses and 50GB of online storage for your backups. At $88.99 per year for 10 licenses, Kaspersky is a low-price leader. Sophos Home Premium for Mac is among the few that cost less, at $60 per year to protect 10 Macs or PCs.You can also get away with paying nothing at all—Avast One Essential and Avira don't cost a thing. But in the realm of for-pay Mac protection, Kaspersky is a good deal.Most Mac users just go with the flow and keep macOS updated to the latest version, but some folks are stuck with an older version. Bitdefender, CleanMyMac, and ClamXAV (for Mac) can handle Yosemite (10.10) or newer, while ProtectWorks goes back to Snow Leopard (10.6). Kaspersky wants a modern OS, Catalina (10.15) or better. Avira Free Antivirus for Mac, McAfee, and Norton also require Catalina or later.Getting Started With Kaspersky Standard for MacInstalling Kaspersky on a Mac is a quick, simple process. After installation, it walks you through setting all the permissions that every Mac antivirus needs. I was impressed by the thoroughness and clarity of the walkthrough. Note that if you’ve already activated your Kaspersky Standard subscription, you can easily extend protection to another Mac or PC from the My Kaspersky console online. Kaspersky also supports Android and iOS; I’ll cover those platforms in my review of Kaspersky Plus.With this new product line, Kaspersky completely changed the appearance and layout of the Windows product. I’m not entirely a fan of the new style, which involves picking from a left-side menu to reveal lengthy scrolling pages of features. That total makeover hasn’t reached macOS. Kaspersky Standard looks almost exactly like Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac in the previous product line.A big image of a MacBook dominates the product's main window. If the pictured monitor is green, with a check mark, everything is fine. The monitor turns red if something's wrong, and it also shows an explanation and a button you can click to fix the problem. Three icons occupy a strip across the bottom: Scan, Update, and Privacy. Safe Kids, present in the earlier Kaspersky Internet Security, doesn’t appear. A big blue button opens the Protection Center, which has three pages. On the Protection page, you can confirm that important features are enabled. The Recommendations page offers advice to get the most from your antivirus. For example, it advised installing the browser extensions, connecting to My Kaspersky online, and enabling Location Services. Finally, the News page offers product information, such as what's new in the current edition.Excellent Antivirus Lab Test ResultsWhen evaluating a Windows-based antivirus program, I study the reports from four independent testing labs around the world, and supplement what I learn with hands-on testing. Kaspersky's Windows antivirus earned perfect and near-perfect scores in the latest reports from the three labs that included it.Only two of those labs perform tests on macOS antivirus, alas. Their reports are important because my hands-on testing routines use programs that only work under Windows. Reflecting Kaspersky’s importance, both AV-Test and AV-Comparatives include it in testing for Mac malware protection.AV-Test Institute rates antivirus products on three criteria: effective malware protection, a small impact on performance, and few false positives (valid URLs and programs slammed as malicious). A product can get six points in each category. Along with most of the tested products, Kaspersky scored 18 points, the maximum.In the latest report from AV-Comparatives, Avast, AVG, Bitdefender, and Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac detected 100% of the macOS malware samples, while Kaspersky lagged a bit with 99.2% detection. Like most tested products, it detected 100% of Windows-focused malware. Why does that even matter? It's important because your Mac could conceivably serve to transmit such threats to one of your Windows machines, where they could do some damage.This lab’s latest test also checks detection of PUAs, or potentially unwanted applications. PUAs aren’t necessarily malicious, but they can have unwanted or annoying behaviors. Scores in this test ranged from 97% to 99%—nobody reached 100% detection. Kaspersky is right in the middle, with 98%. The test noted that Kaspersky users must actively turn on detection of PUAs, described by Kaspersky as legitimate software that can be misused.You'll notice in the chart that quite a few products don't show results from either lab. Almost all of these did appear in one or more previous reports, just not in the current ones.Mediocre Phishing Protection ScoreViruses, Trojans, and other common types of malware work on only one operating system. Many rely on security holes in a specific, vulnerable version of that platform. Phishing attacks, on the other hand, are totally platform-agnostic. If your internet-aware John Deere tractor includes a web browser, a phishing site can trick you into giving away your login credentials. Kaspersky's plug-in for Safari, Chrome and Firefox scans your internet traffic for fraudulent or malicious pages and steers the browser to safety. To test phishing protection, I first collect hundreds of reported fraudulent URLs, making sure to include ones that haven't yet been analyzed and blacklisted, along with verified frauds. I use a hand-coded utility to launch each URL simultaneously in three browsers, relying on the protection built into Chrome, Edge, and Firefox. That utility is a Windows program, so for Mac product testing, I use my button-mashing skills to rapidly copy and paste each URL into the browser and record the results manually.If any browser displays an error message, I discard that URL. If the page isn't clearly an imitation of a sensitive site, with fields to capture your username and password, I also discard it. When the test is finished, I compare the detection rate of the product under test with that of the three browsers.At one time, the Windows and macOS Kaspersky products regularly scored at or near the top in this test. A couple of years ago, they both got 100%, but in my previous test, the Mac edition dropped into the low 80s. This time around, I put Kaspersky Standard to the test simultaneously on Windows and macOS. The Windows product scored an impressive 99%, but the Mac edition reached just 88%.Other Mac-centric antivirus tools show themselves much more effective at detecting and foiling phishing frauds. McAfee AntiVirus Plus (for Mac) , Norton, Trend, and Webroot all reached 100% in their latest macOS phishing protection tests.Scans and SchedulesIn addition to the expected quick and full scans for malware, Kaspersky offers a custom scan that lets you scan specific files or folders. It also offers to scan any removable drive you mount.On the Mac I use for all my testing, a quick scan finished in barely over a minute, while a full scan took 54 minutes, longer than the current average of 40 minutes for a full scan. CleanMyMac is the speediest of recent products, completing a full scan in just one minute (though I admit, I’m not sure about this product’s definition of a full scan). MacKeeper is next, with a seven-minute scan.I'm not equipped to analyze actual macOS malware attacks on the test system, but I did mount a thumb drive containing malware from my Windows antivirus testing. When I opened the folder, it took a minute or two before Kaspersky reacted. Once it got started, though, it silently eliminated most of them, including all the ransomware samples. It asked my permission before deleting items in the potentially unwanted category. Its overall score of 90% is quite good. Note, though, that Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus (for Mac) and Total Defense managed 97%, the best score among current products. After that initial full scan, real-time protection layers should theoretically prevent any further incursions by malware. Even so, many users like to schedule a regular scan, just in case. ESET Cyber Security (for Mac) includes an elaborate scheduling system that even lets you schedule the launch of third-party applications. McAfee and Webroot, among others, let you create a daily or weekly scan schedule. With Kaspersky, you get the simple ability to schedule a daily or weekly run of a full or quick scan.Kaspersky Security Extension for Your BrowsersIf you followed the recommendations on the main window, you’ve installed Kaspersky’s security extension in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Clicking the toolbar icon reveals that this extension provides five services: Web Anti-Virus, Website Tracking, Safe Money, URL Advisor, and Onscreen Keyboard. We’ve already seen Web Anti-Virus in action as it diverted the browser away from phishing pages. It also warns about “dangerous objects that can harm your computer or data.”If you enable it, the Website Tracking feature prevents ads and other web page components from tracking your web surfing activities. Note that Safari has its anti-tracking system built right in. Kaspersky shows the total number of trackers blocked, with a link to view an overwhelmingly detailed full report on every tracker found. Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac’s similar feature provides a better overview of its findings. You can dig into Kaspersky’s Preferences to toggle blocking on or off for four categories: Web analytics, Ad agencies, Web behavior trackers, and Social networks. On Windows, Safe Money actively protects your financial transactions by opening sensitive sites in a special browser that's hardened against outside interference. A glowing green border is a visual reminder that you're using a safe browser. Safe Money on the Mac is a completely different thing. When you visit a sensitive website, Kaspersky double-checks it with the Kaspersky Security Network online and slides out a notification to let you know whether the site is legitimate. I couldn’t prod this feature into action, not even when I manually added a few bank sites to its list.Browsing the web isn’t a platform-specific activity, so it’s no surprise that the URL Advisor feature appears in both the Mac and Windows editions. This feature rates the safety of links found in results from popular search engines, placing a small, color-coded icon to the left of the link. Under Windows, this feature puts a green icon next to safe links, while on the Mac, it marks only dangerous links. Norton's similar feature lets you bring up a full page analysis, showing exactly why it's marked as dangerous. It’s conceivable, though unlikely, that a keylogger program might get past antivirus protections or that an espionage expert might plant a hardware device to capture keystrokes. Were that to happen, it would expose everything you type, including your passwords. To foil such chicanery, you can enable the Onscreen keyboard. The keyboard appears automatically for any web page that includes a password field, so you can enter your information without going through the physical keyboard.Privacy ToolsDo you ever worry that some internet creep might spy on you through your MacBook's webcam? You’re right to worry, as it’s a very real possibility. Kaspersky's Privacy Protection features include a simple webcam block. Under Windows, you can set Kaspersky to allow specific programs while blocking unknowns, and you can also block spying through the microphone. The macOS version is just an on/off switch for the webcam, so you must unblock the camera for tasks like video conferencing. To confirm that this feature works, I blocked the webcam and then launched FaceTime. FaceTime reported "no camera available," and a slide-in notification reported that Kaspersky blocked access.As on Windows, Kaspersky for Mac can check your email addresses against a database of leaks, but it works a bit differently. In Kaspersky Free it automatically checks the email associated with your Kaspersky account. There’s a field for entering an arbitrary address, but if you do it informs you that this feature is only for Kaspersky Plus and Premium. The Standard edition on Windows simply tracks your main email without even offering a spot to enter another. But on the Mac, at the Standard level, you can enter any email you like and see whether it’s been exposed. While not a full-scale firewall like that found in Intego Mac Internet Security X9 and Norton, its Network Attack Blocker watches for port scans and other attacks from the internet. When Kaspersky detects an attack, it imposes a temporary block on all traffic from the offending site. As a bonus, it can warn when you connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot that’s not properly secured.A Full-Featured Antivirus for MacKaspersky Standard for Mac occupies the position in the new Kaspersky product line that used to be held by Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac. Windows products got a major user interface makeover, but that change hasn’t come to macOS. It’s almost the same product, except for the removal of parental control and VPN, and those two features weren’t fully functional without an extra subscription.What you get now is malware protection certified by one lab, protection against malicious and fraudulent web pages that scored poorly in our phishing protection test, and a browser extension that provides various privacy and security functions. Other features include the firewall-like Network Attack Blocker, a notification when you connect to unsafe Wi-Fi, and a simple scan to check your email addresses for online exposure. It goes beyond the basics, but for a truly rich feature set, you’ll need to upgrade to Plus or Premium.Norton 360 Deluxe isn't just for macOS; you can install its protection on Windows, Android, and iOS devices as well. It costs a good bit more, but Norton is more than just antivirus. Notably, its included VPN comes without limits on bandwidth or server choices. Like Kaspersky, Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac earns certification in tests from two labs, and it still includes a feature-limited VPN. As such, Bitdefender and Norton are our Editors' Choice Mac antivirus products.

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