Sophos Versus Avast For Mac 2015

1. Sophos Home Premium For Mac
2. Malwarebytes For Mac
3. Sophos Antivirus For Mac Review
4. Avast For Mac Free Download
5. Avast

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In this aspect Avast outperforms Sophos but again the difference is small. Overall we’re just talking a few minutes faster but on an old Core 2 Duo Mac mini Avast beat Sophos by a good hour. Compatibility: Sophos offers both an Intel and a PowerPC version and supports OS X 10.4 – 10.8 (works on 10.9 Mavericks too). It is a trial version offline installer of Avast Free Mac Security Free Download. It is available for both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) architecture system. Download (10.14 MB). Question for the new version ( Mac Version ): Is possible to update the 2015 directly from AVAST? I mean 2015 to 2016 I do not owe a Mac, neither do i have a VM with Avast right now, but it should be possible, the updater should be in the Settings section. Sophos antivirus for mac free download - Sophos Home, AVG AntiVirus for Mac, Sophos Home, and many more programs.

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• Avast Security Pro for Mac

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The big friendly “You Are Protected” green checkmark on Avast Security Pro’s home screen is certainly a plausible statement. The software is a rare breath of fresh air in a sea of anti-virus products that haven’t worked hard enough to keep up to date with current threats, or haven’t updated the interface to meet modern expectations of presentation and usability.

Avast is danged good at catching malware. AV Comparables says Avast detected 99.9 percent of macOS malware and 100 percent of Windows malware. In spot testing, the app did splendidly. Immediately on decompression of macOS malware from an encrypted archive, Avast detected it, deleted it, and notified me. It did as well with malicious files on the web, though it didn’t detect some items at the WICAR test site that require active local components to be dangerous. Siccing it on drives loaded with other anti-virus products, Avast found test malware I’d downloaded that had wound up in cached files that the anti-virus software on those volumes missed.

Note: This review is part of our best antivirus roundup. Go there for details about competing products and how we tested them.

Avast’s browser component, Web Shield, doesn’t seem to rely on plug-ins (there are none to configure), but uses the program’s kernel extension to check at a low level. It can be managed from the Avast app, and settings apply to all browsers.

If you’re interested in ransomware monitoring, you need to buy the Pro version ($59.99 for one year/one Mac; $69.99 for one year/three Macs; $99.99 for one year/10 Macs), which relies on folder-based ransomware monitoring. It marks the user Documents and Pictures folders as protected by default, and you can add more folders. By default, Avast allows any Apple and App Store apps to manipulate items in those folders, although you can disable those options. Any other app that tries to modify or delete anything in the shielded folders is blocked, giving you an option to whitelist it.

This is an effective way to protect most users’ critical files, but we prefer Sophos’s active monitoring approach, which looks for patterns of behavior and keeps files from being deleted than one that requires anointing folders. Still, it worked well in testing, and most users keep their most precious documents in a few locations. (Avast could expand the list to include a few more locations by default, too.)

Outside of core anti-virus features, the Pro version also offers a Wi-Fi Inspector. This is unique among anti-virus software we tested, and it looks for devices on a network engaged in malicious behavior. Other anti-virus software packaged with network monitors either whitelist local network activity, or treat it the same as any malicious Internet attacks. This seems aimed at helping users understand if they’ve joined a network, such as at a coffeeshop, that has compromised or attacking devices on it.

One negative is the soft but distinct upsell of Avast, which is sensible in its Free version, but not necessarily in a Pro. A Tools item on the lefthand navigation bar mostly displays other available products, like VPN service. A one-time message at installation might be acceptable, but mingling features and items for sale is too heavy-handed in a security product.

While you can create an account at Avast Software, it’s optional. Once created, you can use it to add machines to log in from the software for a computer to join the account. Unfortunately, the account provides no remote mangement or configuration, just reporting.

Bottom line

If you’re looking for a free anti-virus program, Avast is the best choice, edging out Sophos by providing more parity between free and paid version.

While we gave Sophos Home Premium and Avast Security Pro the same 4.5 mice rating, Sophos has a slight edge. The combination of active ransomware scanning makes it somewhat more superior to the folder-based method in Avast, while central configuration and remote control in Sophos can help for a disparate set of family or small-business users. We like Avast’s unique Wi-Fi threat detection, and its native app interface, where Sophos leans heavily on the cloud.

Version 13.4

• Avast Security Pro for Mac

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• Avast Free Mac Security

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• Pros

  Remote management. Detected many Windows malware samples in hands-on test. Decent phishing protection. Simple parental control. Free.

• Cons

  No scores from independent labs. Limited content filter missed some racy sites. Very slow full scan. Phishing score lags Windows edition.

• Bottom Line

  Sophos Home Free (for Mac) keeps configuration to a minimum, but doesn't have independent test scores to verify its accuracy. It can be a good choice for protecting your Macs at no cost.

PCs get viruses, Macs don't. You know it's true—you saw it on TV! Alas, the reality is a bit different from that. Yes, Windows is more popular with malware coders around the world, because it offers more of an attack surface. You'd be nuts to go without antivirus protection on your Windows boxes. But Macs need protection too, especially from ransomware. If you're willing to protect your Macs with antivirus but don't want to lay out cash for that purpose, consider Sophos Home Free (for Mac), especially if you need to manage protection for others.

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The big business for Sophos is Enterprise-level antivirus systems, where an IT administrator controls all the local installations. It's no surprise that the consumer edition works the same way. To get started with Sophos, you register an account online. From the online console you can install and manage protection on three devices, whether they run macOS or Windows. If you need more than three and don't want to set up another free account on a separate email, you must upgrade to Sophos Home Premium (for Mac). The Premium edition lets you manage 10 devices, and adds useful security-related features.

Sophos installed in a flash on the MacBook Air I use for testing. The product was ready to use, including all the latest antivirus signature updates, within a minute or two.

With Sophos Home Free on Windows, you see the small, simple window of a local antivirus agent, with all logging and configuration happening online. The Mac edition goes a step beyond. It has no main window—just a tiny pop-up invoked by clicking its icon. The pop-up reports security status, lists recent activity, and serves as a progress display when you're running a scan. From its menu you can manage your devices, view all activity, or configure preferences; selecting any of these three sends you to the online dashboard.

The Windows antivirus always runs a full scan, while the default on a Mac is a quick scan. You can check a box to make it a full scan, and you should do that at least once after installation, to wipe out any preexisting malware conditions.

Pricing and OS Support

It's true that the number of malware attacks on macOS devices pales next to the huge number aimed at Windows, so you might be tempted to skip antivirus on the Mac. Why invest in protection you might not need? But installing Sophos on your personal Macs requires no investment beyond a few minutes of your time. Avast, Avira, and AVG also offer free antivirus protection for the Mac. Avira Free Antivirus for Mac, in particular, has no restrictions on number of installations and doesn't require that you register.

For comparison, non-free macOS antivirus utilities typically go for about $40 per year, or $60 for three licenses. McAfee AntiVirus Plus (for Mac) takes a different approach. Your $59.99 subscription lets you install protection on every Mac in your household, as well as any devices running Windows, Android, or iOS.

Sophos Home Premium For Mac

Apple makes keeping your operating system updated really easy, whether it's iOS or macOS. Most Mac users migrate to the latest as soon as it's available. For those lagging just a little, Sophos supports macOS versions from El Capitan (10.11) to the latest. Avira also required El Capitan, while Avast Security (for Mac) and AVG go back to Yosemite (10.10).

If you're stuck using an old Mac that can't handle the latest updates, you may need a commercial antivirus. Webroot is compatible with versions back to Lion (10.7). That's impressive, but ProtectWorks AntiVirus (for Mac) goes even farther, with support for Snow Leopard (10.6) and later.

Online Dashboard

Other than real-time protection and antivirus scans, everything about this product takes place in the online console. Clicking Manage Devices, Show All Activity, or Preferences from the menu takes you to the console. From any computer, Windows or Mac, you can log into the console online and install Sophos Free (provided you haven't used up your three licenses).

Clicking an existing device from the console brings up activities and settings for that device. In the free edition, only Antivirus Protection and Web Protection are enabled. If you want Ransomware Protection, Privacy Protection, and Malicious Traffic Detection, you'll have to upgrade to Premium.

Settings are almost identical on Windows and macOS installations. The one significant difference is the feature called Download Reputation. On Windows devices, this feature works to double-check files that the regular real-time protection system doesn't catch. It checks each download against an online reputation database that considers the source website, content, and feedback from other protected computers. If the reputation is bad, Sophos offers to kill the download. That feature doesn't appear in the macOS edition.

No Test Results From the Labs

If you're looking for a new computer, you probably peruse PCMag's reviews to find out which one scores best in various feature areas. I do something similar when reviewing antivirus utilities, checking results from the big independent testing labs. I follow four labs that regularly publish test results for Windows antivirus utilities, and two of those also cover Mac antivirus.

When I first put it to the test, Sophos held Mac certification from AV-Comparatives. In fact, all the products in my initial round of Mac antivirus reviews had at least one certification.

Unfortunately, Sophos doesn't appear in current reports from either AV-Comparatives or AV-Test Institute. As you can see from the chart, that's true for about half the products I've reviewed. It's not a reflection on the products that don't appear. The test labs regularly shuffle the sample sets for their reports. But the absence of independent certification does make it hard for me to determine whether a Mac antivirus utility is effective.

Bitdefender, Intego Mac Internet Security X9, and Trend Micro earned certification from both labs, and took top scores. Kaspersky came close to perfect marks, but lost a half-point for Performance, from AV-Test.

Scanning and Scheduling

I always advise running a full scan after installing any antivirus utility, to make sure there's no malware lurking on the system. After that initial full scan, you can probably rely on real-time protection to handle any new attacks. If you're at all worried, you can schedule a full or quick scan for any day of the week, just as with the Windows edition.

When I last tested this utility, it ran a full scan in 20 minutes, a little better than average for scan time on this Mac test system. I don't know what changed, but this time around that full scan took more than two hours. A second scan took just as long. That's longer than any recent product, though ESET did require an hour and a half. At the quick end of the scale, Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus (for Mac) only needed two and a half minutes to complete its full scan, and Trend Micro did the job in 10 minutes.

I still advise a full scan after installing Sophos, but perhaps one time is enough. That full scan did detect malware hiding in odd places like the trash and some cache folders, including quarantine folders left over from long-deleted installations of other products.

Malware written to attack Windows machines can't affect Macs, and vice versa. Even so, most Mac antivirus tools also wipe out any Windows malware they find. That eliminates the faint possibility that your Mac might act as a carrier, passing malware along to Windows boxes on your network. Sophos is among those products that aim to kill off any Windows malware they see.

To test this feature, I copied my Windows malware samples to a thumb drive and mounted it on the Mac. Sophos immediately started popping up notifications about threats blocked. For known threats, the pop-up came with just a Close button; pop-ups for lower-risk PUAs offered a choice, Close or Clean. I always clicked Clean.

This deluge of pop-ups went on for at least 10 minutes, totaling vastly more notifications than the actual number of samples. I could see some of the same ones showing up over and over. When the pop-up storm finally subsided, Sophos had removed 86 percent of the Windows malware. That's pretty good, but when last tested it caught 100 percent of the then-current sample set. Webroot also whacked 100 percent of those samples.

As noted, Sophos started scanning the contents of the USB drive as soon as I mounted it. If you want to launch a scan of any folder, including folders on a removable drive, you can Control+Click and choose Scan with Sophos Home from the menu.

Decent Phishing Protection

It's possible to craft a website that drops malware on every visitor, or performs other dirty deeds. However, doing so isn't easy, and the result tends to be OS-specific. It's a lot easier to build a phishing website and just wait for saps to hand you their security credentials. A phishing site duplicates the appearance of a secure site such as a bank, a gaming site, or even an online dating site. It looks totally legit, unless you notice the wrong URL in the address bar or some other sign recognizing a phishing scam can be tough. And phishing is completely platform-agnostic. If you enter your username and password, they go straight into the hot little hands of the scammer. In most cases, the fraudulent site passes your login along to the real thing, so you don't even know you've been pwned.

Unlike most Mac antivirus products, Sophos doesn't rely on a browser add-on to filter out malicious and fraudulent URLs. It does it work below the browser level, so it works even if you've chosen an off-brand browser.

There's one slightly awkward side effect of this browser-independent technology. If the fraudulent site uses HTTPS, Sophos can't replace the page with a warning. When this happens on Windows, the browser displays an error message and Sophos tells you what happened with a pop-up. On the Mac, you just see an error message. I had to dig into the activity log to identify which errors reflected blocking a secure URL and which were just plain errors.

Interestingly, the two Sophos editions didn't quite come up with the same results. The macOS edition missed some fraudulent pages that the Windows edition caught. It also caught a few that the Windows edition missed, but not nearly as many.

Sophos detected 82 percent of the verified phishing URLs, which is decent but not stellar. It beat Firefox and Internet Explorer, but lagged seven percentage points behind Chrome. Tested simultaneously, the Windows edition managed 91 percent detection.

Phishing websites are platform-independent, but clearly phishing protection needn't be. It's common for a Mac antivirus to lag behind its Windows equivalent in this test. However, there are exceptions. McAfee and Webroot scored precisely the same as their Windows equivalents, with 100 percent and 97 percent detection respectively.

Porous Web Content Filtering

As with the Windows edition, Sophos offers a very simple parental control web content filter, managed from the online console. Filtering is by device, with no option to exempt certain user accounts. For each of 28 content categories, you can choose to block all access, or to just warn that proceeding to the site is inadvisable and will be logged.

I tried connecting with a few dozen raunchy sites. To my surprise, several got past the filter, including some that Sophos caught on Windows. I did find that since my last review, Sophos added the ability to filter unwanted HTTPS websites. However, it can't display its usual warning for these, and doesn't pop up a notification the way it does on Windows. A blocked HTTPS porn page just causes an error message in the browser.

As with the Windows edition, if you choose to warn about inappropriate sites rather than block them, Sophos doesn't handle HTTPS sites. I had no trouble connecting with HTTPS porn sites. In this mode, a tech-savvy youngster could connect through a secure anonymizing proxy and completely evade all parental control and monitoring. The limited parental control system offered by Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac is also foiled by anonymizing proxies.

On Windows, content filtering only works in supported browsers (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera). I found that I could ignore the filter completely by browsing with Vivaldi. On the Mac, the filter seems to be browser-independent. At least, it blocked pages in Safari, Chrome, and Vivaldi.

If you really want parental control served up with your Mac antivirus, Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac is your best bet. It includes content filtering, time scheduling, and more. As for the limited, porous content filter in Sophos, it's not worth your time.

Malwarebytes For Mac

Free and Easy

Sophos Home Free has shrunk its Mac edition down to a menu bar button with a tiny pop-up window. All the settings and logs reside online. Alas, the independent labs no longer include it in testing, so it's hard to be sure of its effectiveness. It earns a decent score in our phishing protection test, and detects most (but not all) of our Windows malware samples. The addition of a parental control content filter looks like a bonus, until you see that it has numerous problems.

Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac and Kaspersky Internet Security for Mac earned certification from both independent testing labs, and both offer features beyond basic antivirus. Bitdefender marks dangerous links in search results and protects your sensitive documents against ransomware attack. Kaspersky goes full-on security suite, with network defense, privacy protection, parental control, and more. Bitdefender and Kaspersky are our Editors' Choice picks for Mac antivirus protection. If you just can't justify paying for Mac antivirus, look at Avast Security (for Mac) or Avira Free Antivirus for Mac. These two earned certification from both labs, though not with the very highest scores.

Sophos Antivirus For Mac Review

Bottom Line: Sophos Home Free (for Mac) keeps configuration to a minimum, but doesn't have independent test scores to verify its accuracy. It can be a good choice for protecting your Macs at no cost.

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