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 Your exposure goes up tremendously if you're running an outdated OS (which a decent number of people do due to their dislike of High Sierra).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