Any recommendations/experience with anti-virus software?

Question

Any recommendations on/experience with anti-virus software?

Answer 1

Norland88 wrote:
Any recommendations on/experience with anti-virus software?
Mac OS X is a smaller market, and, so far, and for whatever reason, a smaller target. Consequently, although major A/V vendors do usually have a Mac division, it seems to me that they employ for it the B-team. As a result, some Mac A/V tools create more problems than they solve.
Furthermore, as WZZZ  rightly points out, all A/V tools (irrespective of platfom) fight yesterday's problem. They can only protect you against the threats they've already seen and analysed.
So, the question is: Do you need an A/V tool?
The people who say, "No, because there are no Mac viruses" are technically right, but in a very narrow sense. There are no Mac viruses—but there is Mac malware. MacDefender and iWork Services are examples; the recent Flashback infection—there've been threads dealing with it in this very forum for the past month—is another. So it really depends on what you do. The iWork Services Trojan Horse spread through a hacked download of Apple's iWork suite, distributed primarily through P2P file sharing. If you do that kind of stuff, you are at risk. Flashback spread through a Java vulnerability. If you browse the net with Java enabled, you are at risk.
Then there's the issue of exchanging files with Windows. If you work in a mixed Win/Mac environment, or exchange documents with others who use Windows, you may be the unwitting vector of infection, by transmitting Windows malware from one PC-using correspondent to another. The Win malware would not affect you in any way—but it would certainly affect them.
Therefore, the answer depends primarily on you.