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Here's how to get a free virus scan to check for malware on your Mac, how to get rid of Mac viruses for free, and how to avoid getting infected in the first place. Assuming you suspect your Mac has a virus, or you just want to check and be sure that there are no harmful files on it – you should carry out a virus scan. One of the easiest ways to do that is by using Movavi Mac Cleaner’s built-in antivirus to check for any harmful files and safely remove them. However, if you suspect that the device is infected by some viruses or malware, then you can run a virus scan on your device. Otherwise, this guide can help you on how to check for virus on Mac. This article can help you by providing a details idea on how to recognize the symptoms of a virus infection on the Mac. So, let’s begin.

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While each piece of unwanted software that tries to get on your Mac is slightly different, there are some general steps you can take to check for and remove malware. The LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons folders are usual locations to check. You should also look for unwanted browser extensions and do an audit of the files in your Applications folder.

Check out Checking For and Removing Adware From Your Mac at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: So let's say you suspect that you have adware on your Mac. Adware is not as serious as some malware. It's not really stealing your information or doing harm to your computer but it's showing you ads everywhere and it's annoying and you shouldn't have it on your Mac. Of course the way to avoid that is to make sure you only download software from sites you trust and to research software before you download it. But once you have it you want to get rid of it. You can look in some general places and do some general things that will get rid of most kinds of adware. If you can identify the kind of adware you've got the best thing to do is to goggle that with the keywords Mac, remove, and the name of the adware. Usually you'll come up with some site that gives you instructions. As a matter of fact it's best to look at several sites that give you instructions and see that they all agree before actually doing those things.But let's say you want to go and check in the usual places and try to clean up your Mac a little bit. So the first thing you want to do, is you want to make sure you quit any apps that you're running, especially Safari. So you quit that and you're out of all your apps. Now you're just going to be in the Finder here looking at your files. You're going to use the Go menu to go into your Library. Now you click on Go and there is no Library entry there. But if you hold the Option key down on your keyboard Library pops up, you select it, and now you're in your Library. In your Home folder.I'm going to choose Column view here so I can see things a little easier. So I can see I'm in Library and here are the folders in Library. One of them is something called LaunchAgents. So you're going to look in here. I'm going to expand this column a bit so I can see these things. Now you want to look and see what's in there and try to see if you can identify each item. So, for instance, here's one that obviously Spotify. If you have Spotify installed, it's there, no problem. Skype, the same thing. DropBox, the same thing. There's some form of Adobe. I use lots of Adobe software so I'm not surprised. I know that GC is a kind of software to make sure I have a license to Adobe software on there. So all four of these checkout. I know what they are.If you don't know what something is you can always copy the file name and do a Goggle search on it. Usually you'll come up with somebody that has asked a question before and they say, oh that's for Microsoft or whatever. So you say, yes I have that software so I know that's legitimate. But if you see the name of some adware or something you don't recognize then that may be the culprit and you may want to delete that.Now also look, in addition to LaunchAgents, look for something called LaunchDaemons. That's kind of also another place where things that automatically get launched startup are stored.In addition to your User folder here you want to check the computer's system libraries. There are two libraries. There's the system library which is for all users and there's the User Library which is just for your user account. I'm going to Command click here on the top title bar here so I can go all the way back up to the hard drive level. In the hard drive level I can see the System Library and I can go and see there is LaunchAgents. I can expand this column here as well and check out all of these things to make sure they check out. I can look at LaunchDaemons as well and check all these out as well. I know what each one of these it. There's some stuff from Microsoft. There's my screen recording software. There's a bunch things for Adobe. Backup software. All things that I understand. But if you see the adware that you're trying to get rid of listed here or something you don't recognize then search for it and see if it's something you should delete. So that's your first step.The next thing you'll want to do is go to System Preferences. In there go to User & Groups. Your user there should already be selected. So click on the padlock to authenticate. Go to Login Items. In here you'll see some apps that will automatically startup when you login. So make sure you can identify everything in there. If not search for it or if it's obviously the adware you're trying to get rid of you can select it and use the minus button here to delete it.Now it's time to look in Safari again. But instead of just launching Safari by clicking on Safari you're going to hold the Shift key down as you do so. What this does is any windows that you had opened in the previous session of Safari will not reopen. So if something is kind of in a hidden window somewhere it's going to be eliminated. So now back in Safari and you want to go to Safari Preferences. In Safari Preferences there's a couple things you want to check.First Extensions. Go to Extensions here and it shows you list of extensions. This is a place where sometimes if you had adware installed it's going to be installed as a Safari extension. So you look through here and you make sure you identify everything. Here's the DuckDuckGo privacy extension. I did a tutorial on that a little while ago which is why it's installed. I remember installing it. I know why it's there. I'm good. But if you look at the other things here you may find something there that you don't know what it is. You can search for it or maybe you find the thing that's obviously adware and you can select it and delete it. Don't just deactivate it. Actually just uninstall it with this Uninstall button right here.Also, you can go in the General tab and there's Homepage here. Sometimes what adware does is it changes the Homepage on your browser. So even after you've uninstalled it completely you notice that whenever you open up a new browser window it goes to some weird search engine or some ad or something like that. So check what's here. I have it set to wikipedia from a previous tutorial but you may have it set to nothing, or to Goggle, or something like that. Just make sure that's something you want there as your Homepage.One last general piece of advice. You may want to just, at this point, do an Applications audit on your Mac. So, in the Finder, open a New Finder Window, and you can click on Applications on the sidebar there or go to Applications. Look through all of the applications you see that you have installed. Just do it one by one. Take your time. Almost all of these, and probably all of them, are going to be just fine. You'll recognize them as something you've installed or something that should be there. If there's something you don't recognize, again, Goggle it, see what it is. Just don't blindly delete something that you're unsure about because a lot of things in here that may not have the name you expect or you may not have realize they're on your Mac.But if you see something that's obviously the piece of adware you're dealing with then you're going to want to clean it out of your Applications folder even if it's not set to launch automatically or do anything like that. You don't want it on your Mac. It's a good idea to just do an audit and look through them. I've got, you can see, 154 items here. It wouldn't take me that long to get through them. I'm a pro user that's been adding apps, and I have lots of apps for development and for video editing, for all sorts of things in here. So you probably have even less. Most of these will be things you recognize. There's iMovie, there's Word, there's Pixelmator, Acorn. All the stuff that you probably recognize right at a glance. So it will be quick to go through this and see what, maybe, shouldn't be there.

• Hello, I am a new mac user and i have purchased this macbook pro retina display a few months ago. I do not have any anti virus software on it, and I am just wondering how i would go about checking if there is a trojan horse, virus, or anything of that nature.
• Bottom Line: Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac gets top marks from the independent labs and in our own hands-on testing. With its handy Autopilot mode, you can set it, forget it, and have confidence.
• How to scan your Mac for a virus. Why checking your Mac for viruses is important? If a computer virus was the only thing to watch out for, this world would be a simpler place. Malware, adware, spyware, malicious files, worms, trojans, phishing software, you name it, you should check for it.

Though it's not easy to hack into or break through a Mac's security, it is possible, especially if someone accidentally installs malware without realizing it. If your Mac is running slow or you're seeing unusual advertisements within your web browser you might have accidentally installed malware at some point. Don't worry. It happens to the best of us (not me, of course). There are things you can do without having to burn it all down.

The problem: Mac malware in the Library folder

Serenity Caldwell writing for iMore in 2017:

My father-in-law's MacBook Pro had been running into curious slowdowns for a two-year-old laptop and he kept on seeing weird sites taking over his Safari and Firefox search bars. It was clear to me that his browser had been hijacked.

We got rid of the browser hijack pretty quickly — I suggest using Cella's excellent how-to if you ever run into a browser hijack yourself — but the slowdowns were more curious. Upon further investigation, I found a couple of self-professed 'Mac security programs' that popped up, demanding money to 'clean your Mac from junk'.

Spoiler: These programs were the junk. And worst of all, they'd seemingly added a bunch of nonsense files into this computer's Library folder, with random folder names like 'prestidigitation' and 'beeswax'.

Now, I want to preface: I'd never seen an attack like this on a Mac before in my life, and finding this kind of full-Mac hijack is very rare. It's likely that he accidentally installed one of these 'security' programs (or had it installed), which spiraled out of control from there.

These hijacks didn't appear to be able to do much beyond slow down his machine with endless failed attempts to run a program — the process didn't have admin permissions, so it couldn't execute a thing from the library. But because they were there, they were constantly crashing aspects of his Mac. I knew I had a malfunctioning laptop on my hands, so I turned to my age-old troubleshooting checklist.

How to fix a corrupted Mac

If you're working on a computer that has slowed down beyond reasonable aging or is otherwise acting beyond the pale, here are my favorite tactics you can take to try and restore it to its former glory.

Update the system software

This is almost always the first thing I do when troubleshooting Macs: Chances are, the user hasn't installed a security update or other software updates that may be slowing their computer to a crawl.

1. Click on the Apple menu icon in the upper left corner of the screen.

2. Select App Store to open the Mac App Store.

3. Click on the Updates tab at the top of the Mac App Store window.

4. Install all relevant updates. (You may need the Apple ID and password for the machine.)

If the computer is running macOS Sierra, you can avoid having to do this troubleshooting step in the future by turning on Automatic Install in System Preferences, which can automatically download newly available updates in the background, and install them overnight.

1. With the Mac App Store open, click on App Store in the upper left corner of the Menu bar.

2. Click on Preferences.

3. Under Automatically check for updates, check the following boxes:

   • Download newly available updates in the background
   • Install app updates
   • Install macOS updates
   • Install system data files and security updates

Check the disk for errors

If software updates aren't doing the trick, the next thing to check is the hard drive itself. With Apple's Internet Recovery partition, fixing a cranky drive is an easy process.

1. Restart your Mac.
2. During reboot, hold down Command-R until it starts up.
3. Once rebooted, you should be in the Internet Recovery Partition. Select Disk Utility.

4. Click Continue.

5. In Disk Utility, click on the First Aid button,

6. Click on Run to execute.

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Your Mac will then run a cursory check on its hard drive to determine if there's anything wrong — and if so — if it can fix it.

Reset the NVRAM/PRAM and SMC

If neither app updates nor disk repair are helping, sometimes a good cache flush can get your Mac running just a bit more smoothly.

To reset the NVRAM (or, on older Macs, PRAM), reboot the Mac and hold down the following keyboard command during startup for at least twenty seconds: Command-Option-P-R.

After you reset your NVRAM, you may be required to reconfigure some system settings (like sound and time zones), which are stored in that cache.

An SMC reset is a bit more complicated, and Apple recommends it only after all other troubleshooting avenues have been exhausted.

If you're using a laptop:

1. Shut down your Mac and plug it in.
2. Restart the computer by pressing the Power button along with the keyboard command Shift-Control-Option.
3. Release these keys, then just press the Power button to properly start your computer.

If you're using a desktop:

1. Shut down your Mac.
2. Unplug it and wait for at least 20 seconds.
3. Plug the Mac back in and wait 5-10 seconds.
4. Restart your Mac with the Power button.

Partition your disk (or erase it)

After exhausting all other avenues, this was the solution we came across to properly fix the broken laptop. Widgets for mac notification center. The hard drive had been so corrupted by these 'security' programs that there was nothing I could do to fix it. When Safari launched over the login screen after a reboot, I knew my usual fixes wouldn't work: It was time to bring out the big guns.

In most cases, I'd grab an external drive, back up the corrupted disk, then wipe the drive clean with the Internet Recovery partition and start over. But there were a couple of reasons that wouldn't work here:

• We were on vacation, and lacking any sort of external media.
• With a semi-corrupted disk, we couldn't just clone the user folder and restore the new disk from a backup — we'd have to do a clean install, which meant moving files over one by one. If we'd missed something and moved all the old files to an external drive, my father-in-law would have had to carry it everywhere just in case.

Given that this laptop had a 500GB hard drive — only 40GB of which was being used — I had an alternate idea: I'd partition the drive, again using Internet Recovery, and install macOS Sierra on the new partition. Essentially, it would be a 'clean' new computer for my father-in-law to work on, but all the original data would still exist on the old partition in case he needed to grab a file.

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Note: In order to partition your drive, you'll need enough free space on your drive to do so — at least 30GB. If you're light on space, you may want to back up your corrupted disk to a USB drive, instead.

How to create a partition on your Mac

1. Open Finder from your dock.

2. Select Applications.

3. Scroll down and open the Utilities folder.

4. Double-click to open Disk Utility.

5. Select your hard drive in the Disk Utility window. It will be the first drive on the list. It might be named 'Fusion,' or 'Macintosh HD.'
6. Click on the Partition tab.

7. Click the plus (+) button.

8. Change the size of the partition you wish to use by dragging the resize controls. The used space is represented in blue.
9. Name the new partition.

10. Click apply.

Disk Utility will check the disk and make changes. This will take several minutes.Disk Utility will then make the changes. After that's completed, quit Disk Utility to return to the main Internet Recovery menu.

1. Click on Reinstall macOS.

2. Click Continue.

3. Click Agree to agree to Apple's licensing agreements.
4. Choose the New Mac hard drive as the disk you'd like to install macOS onto.

5. Press Install.

6. The Mac will download a fresh copy of your operating system from the App Store and will install it. The speed of this process entirely depends on your Mac's connection speed to the Internet. You can wait an hour or longer on a slower connection.
7. Your Mac will restart automatically into the new partition once the software has downloaded, then the installation of the operating system will continue.

After you finish setting up the new hard drive, it's time to move your files over. Because of the way partitioning works, your old hard drive partition will show up next to your currently-active partition, just like an external drive; you can then grab any files you need from it.

1. Launch a Finder window.
2. Under Devices in the sidebar, locate your original Macintosh HD.

3. Copy any files you'd like to keep from your old hard drive to the new machine.

Note: If you want to copy over applications, I'd strongly suggest redownloading them from the source — the Mac App Store or the company's website — rather than trying to copy them over from the old partition.

From here, you can follow instructions for setting a Mac up from scratch when it comes to installing and customizing anything else.

I generally recommend keeping the old drive partition around for at least a few months in case you or your family member forgets to move something over; after that period, however, you can easily delete the old partition and move to the new partition full time.

Consider additional anti-malware protection

While malware on the Mac is rare, it does crop up, as we've demonstrated. Having the right tools to get rid of malware can be an important part of keeping your Mac safe and secure. There are a number of tools that you can choose from, including popular programs like BitDefender and Kaspersky, that will help you keep malware from infecting your Mac.

Questions?

Do you have any must-follow troubleshooting steps? Let us know in the comments.

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Updated July 2019: Added a sub-section regarding anti-malware protection.

Serenity Caldwell contributed to an earlier version of this guide.

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