Product Reviews

It's ironic that while the number of live Mac viruses remains resolutely nil, the tally of utilities to combat them continues to grow. The latest comes from Kaspersky, a company better known for its offerings on the PC, though it's keen for its debut on the Mac to be taken seriously. Remnants of its PC heritage are still evident, such as the way the menu bar lies within the application window, though it's adopted some Mac customs, including the 'Growl' notification engine to update you on its activities.

The main interface is unarguably simple. A large button in the main window uses a 'traffic light' metaphor to warn of potential threats, with a yellow or red light indicating security problems. The window also includes links to a detailed reports window, which shows the threats detected, and lists reports of all completed tasks run on your Mac.

As a virus checker, Kaspersky is effective. As soon as you install the program, it starts checking your Mac - an option that can be turned off through the its menu bar or Dock icon. Running in this background mode used around 2% of our test Mac's CPU.

As well as background protection, Kaspersky offers three different one-off virus checks, each of which can be run manually or according to a schedule. Its basic virus scan checks individual files, folders or attached drives. A 'full scan' option checks the entire disk, while a quick scan covers only critical areas, such as the System and Library folders. Each option can be configured, and you can shorten scans by setting a list of files and applications to exclude, though we'd have liked the ability to scan just new or changed files when performing a quick scan.

Kaspersky's

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virus database contains information of more than 25 million malicious programs. Almost all are, in practical terms, irrelevant to Mac users, though the program will at least identify malware in the shared folders of virtual machines used on your Mac, offering some protection if you're regularly working in an unprotected Windows virtual environment on your computer.

Kaspersky coped quickly and robustly with our test files as soon as they were downloaded, offering an audible warning and prompting us to disinfect, delete or skip the infected file. Handily, the warning dialog box includes a link next to listed threats, which links back to Kaspersky's detailed viruslist.com site. This shows details of the threat and the damage it can cause.

Given that a Mac virus hasn't yet arrived, there's some reassurance in the fact that Kaspersky issues updates very frequently. Updates were pushed to our Mac every two or three hours. This is a far more robust approach than that offered by some rivals such as the free ClamXav, which updates its database at most once a day.

As well as protection against the threat of viruses, Kaspersky also claims the application guards against spyware, adware and auto-dialers, and what it terms 'riskware' - non-malicious programs that may pose a security threat to your computer. This additional protection is something that has clear value for PC users, but is of less obvious appeal here. We're not aware of any auto-dialers affecting the Mac, and other malware is scarce. We also couldn't check how well Kaspersky dealt with riskware as we couldn't find any current Mac programs that fell into that category.

That's the problem facing Kaspersky. It's a capable and easy-to-use antivirus application, but what counts against it applies to all antivirus programs on the Mac: the protection it offers is, at the moment, theoretical. That may change, but so may the Mac's inherent protection against it: already the more secure 64-bit Snow Leopard includes basic malware protection. Kaspersky certainly offers peace of mind, but as its £40 cost will only protect you for the next 12 months, it could end up costing a pretty penny before it earns its keep.