That's where a good antivirus program comes in. That's still a significant time period malware can be actively running on your system before it's removed. once a month) and if they suspect there's active malware on their system. Most people only run Malwarebytes at a fixed time interval (e.g. Similarly, a virus removal program like Malwarebytes is only useful if you actually use it. Hell I've gotten away with RDP in HTTP traffic. Not an easy thing for firewalls/packet sniffers to identify as malicious. HTTP tunneling for example will still be outbound on :80 or :8080 and the packets will be properly formatted HTTP packets. httptunnel and ssh tunneling are two commonly used techniques I've personally used to successfully bypass both outgoing firewall rules and packet sniffers. You can tunnel your traffic in other protocols. A good AV will help prevent intruders from staying/doing anything on your system if they manage to find a way onto there.Įgress firewalls aren't perfect. Good network security and good browsing practices will help prevent intruders from getting onto your system. Little Snitch (egress firewall) and Malwarebytes (on-demand virus removal tool) are plenty.

In practice, the main effect of AV software is to slow your system drastically and to provide additional attack surface. It's much more challenging to string together a viable attack on a Mac, but it's definitely not impossible. This is one of multiple pages for exploits from the past year alone. For example, check out this clusterfuck of Windows exploits. Your exposure goes up tremendously if you're running an outdated OS (which a decent number of people do due to their dislike of High Sierra). It's also worth noting that these are just publicly available exploits - there might very well be more/better exploits or even unknown vulnerabilities not publicly disclosed. However, being safer and being entirely safe are two completely different things.įor example, here is a list of publicly available exploits targeting macOS vulnerabilities within the past year.

Macs are generally safer because of their lower market share and because they're not trying to support a decade of legacy software like Windows. I don't think antivirus is needed for Mac

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