A quick way to scan a file, a folder or a volume is to drag & drop it over the Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac window or Dock icon. The scan wizard will appear and guide you through the scanning process. You can also start a scan as follows: 1. Open Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac. Click on Protection. In the Antivirus tab, click one of the 3 scan buttons to start the desired scan. All it takes is one thoughtless click on a link in an email or on a website, and your Mac could be infected. The good news is that performing a Mac virus scan is very easy and if it finds anything, getting rid of the virus is very straightforward, too. How to check your Mac for a virus. There are a number of tell-tale signs that your Mac has a virus.
In this article we do a case study on a recent Mac problem, give reasons why you should always start afresh with each new Mac you buy and in a larger sense why virus checking is more important for Mac users than other platforms, even though viruses are a less widespread problem. Mac Viruses Are No Joke We all know the jokes about Mac viruses, but we are staunchly “platform agnostic” around here. Recently one of our Macs began acting very strangely. It seemed to always be doing something when nothing was running.
The first thought was a virus, and while investigation and virus scanning proved this was almost certainly not the case, the fact remained that something was horribly wrong. It turned out in the end a legacy.ktext configuration file was more than likely to blame, running drivers for some now non-existent graphics tablet and scanner from a previous install which ate all of the free memory.
We’ll get to the madness of cloning your old machine to a new one in a second because this problem raised a bigger question: the role of Mac users in the world of virus spreading. Catching the Bug For Mac users, viruses are less of a problem than users of other platforms (you know who we are referring to, right?), although they are possible and do actually happen. It’s a big mistake as a Mac user to ignore this because although viruses which affect the Mac by covert insertion are uncommon, many other threats exist which could paralyze or ruin your current installation. We recently covered, for example.
And while unaffected by PC virus threats, you can easily become a carrier for PC virus infections. Windows files cross your desk invisibly all the time, and it’s the right thing to do to scan and remove them before you pass them on, otherwise this could be potentially very bad news for your PC-using co-workers, family or friends. In the recent repair of the Mac we mentioned above, for example, scanning revealed a couple of minor Mac threats but literally hundreds of PC viruses on the system.
That’s alarming as hell. Burn Them With Fire There are a few free options which do very well to remove any Mac or PC threats from your machine. AVG, Avast and Bitdefender are the options we tried in purging this problem Mac. Bitdefender free version is a scanner and goes through your files detailing any threats, pointing you to the problem files so you can delete them. AVG Free is a scanner and a shield program.