Your Mac is one of the more outstanding achievements to come out of Silicon Valley, a marvel of design and development, so protect it against those who want to compromise and invade it. Avast Security Pro for Mac gives you the proactive defense you need against all those.bad apples.

• Pros Certified by one independent testing lab. Speedy full scan. Excellent phishing protection for Chrome and Firefox. Network security scanner. Password manager. Website rating. Active Do Not Track.

• Cons Poor phishing protection in Safari. Password manager includes only basic features. • Bottom Line Avast Security (for Mac) delivers effective malware protection along with unusual bonus features. Phishing protection only works well in Chrome and Firefox, but this free utility is still worth a look. For years, Mac users basked in the mystique of virus-free computing. It wasn't true, alas, and as time goes on we see more and more Mac-specific malware attacks.

The situation may not be nearly as bad as for Window or Android, but prudence still dictates that you install on your Macs as well. Avast Security offers Macs protection against malware along with advanced features including a password manager and a network security scanner, all for a cost of exactly nothing. The product's spacious main window features a large status indicator centered in an otherwise-empty white region, with a menu down the left side. It's a very different appearance from on Windows, which uses pops of purple and green on a dark gray background. Pricing and OS Support Like Bitdefender and Kaspersky, Avast supports macOS versions back to 10.9 Mavericks.

If you have an antique Mac that for some reason can't even run Mavericks, consider, ProtectWorks, or ClamXAV (for Mac) all of which support versions from 10.6 (Snow Leopard) on. At the other end of the spectrum, Avira, Trend Micro, and Symantec require macOS 10.11 (El Capitan) or better. When reviewing a, I report how it scored with four independent antivirus testing labs. The very best products earn top scores from all four labs. But even if no test results exist, I can run my own hands-on tests using real-world malware and malware-hosting URLs.

It took years to develop my hands-on tools and tests for Windows. Most of them don't carry over to the macOS platform. Hence lab results become extremely important for my Mac antivirus reviews. Two of the labs I follow, and AV-Comparatives, test Mac antivirus, and Avast participates with one of them. Experts at test Mac antivirus products using the latest macOS malware.

They also evaluate each product's ability to detect Windows malware. While a Trojan written for Windows wouldn't run on a Mac, the Mac could serve as a carrier. Avast managed 99.9 percent protection against Mac malware. That's very good—better than most. However, Bitdefender and Kaspersky exhibited 100 percent protection.

In the Windows malware test, Avast detected 100 percent of the samples. Most competing products also took 100 percent. However, Webroot only caught 75 percent, and got just 18 percent. Like most tested products, Avast received certification from AV-Comparatives for Mac antivirus protection. Having one certification is good; having two is better. Bitdefender, Kaspersky, and Sophos are among the products that received certifications from both labs for Mac. Scan Choices Avast offers several scans to improve your Mac's security.

A full scan on the that I use for testing took 14.5 minutes, just a hair over Intego's 14 minutes, and quicker than the 18 minutes required by Avira. The average for recent products is 24 minutes, so Avast proved quite speedy. Norton is the current speed champ, completing a full scan in 10 minutes. There's a separate scan for removable volumes, though you can configure the full scan to include them. I scanned a thumb drive containing my Windows malware collection and found that it quarantined 85 percent of them. For comparison, Avira detected 82 percent of these, while wiped out every single one.

There's no predefined quick scan, which makes sense given the speed of the full scan. The custom scan settings confused me, though. Free media converter for mac. As with the full scan, you can add file locations to exclude from scanning, and configure it to scan Time Machine backups. But the full scan's settings include those options, and also let you include removable volumes and network volumes, while the custom scan's settings do not. You can schedule a daily, weekly, or monthly scan if desired. Settings for a scheduled scan include two additional choices. You can set it to skip scanning if your device is running on batteries, and you can have it wake from sleep if necessary, to perform its scheduled scan.