Just out of curiosity, yesterday I installed avast! antivirus for Mac and run a full scan. According to review, it’s one of the best antivirus available for Mac today with virus/malware 100% detection rate.
A full scan took 4 hours 14 minutes. And it turns out… my Mac has 3 files that contain viruses ! Does this mean that Mac is not safe?
Now here’s the twist. All those 3 files are EXE files. EXE files are Windows application and can do no harm to Mac OSX. So these are the files I had from Windows machines from office, from campus and from a friend.
According to avast! documentation, they detect Windows viruses too because even those files won’t harm Mac in any way, the Mac machine can potentially become a carrier. It means, if I copy those files to a Windows machines, it can still harm them. Makes sense.
But I guess now I’m sure that Mac is safe. I haven’t done any format-and-fresh-install since 2010. So it’s 4 years of usage and not even a single Mac virus. Not bad.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that there is no virus for Mac. My conclusion is that as long as we protect our Mac regularly with the latest updates, the chance of actually got a virus is really low (but not zero).
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