Kaspersky is expanding its scope by offering Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Mac, its first security program for the Apple Mac. But how much does the Mac need anti-virus, and does it work?
Adjustments of Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Mac are to be found within various parts of the app's preferences, although we had to dig down into preferences-within-preferences sometimes to switch on settings such as scan email files.
On first installation, it will download an update of the latest virus definitions from Kaspersky's servers, after which it's ready to execute its first scan.
The Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Mac interface comprises a floating window with a large green circular porthole to the right, which changes colour to an ominous yellow when it detects a possible threat. Clicking the magnifying glass button offers a choice of three scan modes.
The Quick Scan feature scours all files within specific directories deemed more sensitive to malware on the system's hard drive, focusing on folders such as ~/Documents, ~/Downloads, and /Library/StartUp Items.
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The Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Mac program compares scanned files' signatures against Kaspersky Labs' list of known malware. Relatively speaking, this list includes a very small number of objects for OS X (around 40 at time of press, based on Kaspersky's database of OS X threats which stretches back four years ago); but the threat database also includes well over 3 million definitions from the predominant Windows threat landscape.
And this explains a more pertinent need for AV software such as KAV for Mac: to screen malware that's harmless to a Mac user, but which could prove ruinous if passed on to a Windows-using colleague.
Or indeed to a Mac computer if it has Windows installed on a Boot Camp partition, or under virtualization with VMware, VirtualBox or Parallels.
A Full Scan feature, meanwhile, simply looks through the contents of all connected hard drives. In our tests on a MacBook Pro with an 50%-full 500GB hard drive, the Quick Scan took around 4 hours to complete, while the Full Scan took closer to 6 hours.
When Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Mac finds malware, a yellow thundercloud appears along with a Growl notification under the menu bar
After some show-stopping teething troubles with the initial release of the product last October (including random crashes and over 150% CPU usage), Kaspersky issued an update this January which allowed our installation of the app to complete system scans, and to scan with crucially lower system resources.
We saw typical CPU usage pegged at around 20-30% for manual background scans, with the system remaining responsive all the while.
At all other times, the program sat in the background consuming around 3-5% CPU. At no point could we verify Kaspersky's claim of ‘consuming less than 1% of processing power'.
If Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Mac should find a flagged threat, you'll hear Kaspersky's trademark roaring-lion sound effect, while a pop-up window below the menu bar clock appears briefly with more details of the alert.
As well as on-demand and scheduled scans, the app will also screen new files as they arrive on the system, either downloaded over the internet or from external media. And even copying a file from one location on the drive to another set the program into action; we saw spikes exceeding 80% CPU use here.
Scans of all types are said to include a search within compressed .zip files, as well as other archives like .rar; but absent is any ability to check inside dormant .iso or .dmg images. In our tests, Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Mac remained oblivious to malware inside either of these popular disk image formats, although it would flag malware that was simply zipped.
Starting to appear with recent updates to Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Mac are more definitions to flag the presence of commercial keyloggers. While not ‘malware' in the sense of causing direct damage to the system, they may be operating without the active user's knowledge, perhaps installed by a suspicious spouse, employer, or for industrial espionage.
Some AV software is primed to alert the end user of the presence of such bugging software, while other packages give the computer's administartor the option of switch off alerts to other users about installed spy programs.
In the case of Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Mac, you'll need to first manually tick ‘Potentially dangerous software (riskware)' from the Threats tab of the app's preferences. But even then, we found it would miss some keyloggers we had installed on our test machine.
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