Howard Oakley’s article today (Why your Mac may not scan for malware) is giving me pause for thought.
I have long resisted having any active third party malware scanning on my Macs, preferring passive and some of the Objective-See suite, and most importantly believing that Apple was making significant progress on built in protection.
Oakley’s concluding paragraph is causing me to question this:
"Although XPR should be a big improvement on MRT, it’s now unreliable on most laptops, and its lack of reporting makes it inferior to third-party substitutes. Particularly on laptops that are run mostly on battery power, XPR scans can occur infrequently and their outcome may be impossible to discover. If you want a more reliable and transparent malware scanner, you’re better off using a third-party product.
Given the engineering effort that has gone into developing XProtect Remediator, this is a great shame."