Intego Mac Internet Security X9 review

Price When Reviewed

$24.99 for the first year, then $49.99 per year, 1 Mac

Best Prices Today: Intego Mac Internet Security X9

It may not be perfect, but sometimes a software company gets its utility completely right, complete with a focus that deserves additional attention.

Intego’s Mac Internet Security X9 falls into this category, the utility bundling the company’s VirusBarrier (at the time of this review, version 10.9.85 build 3495) and NetBarrier (version 10.9.31 build 884) applications to act as both an antiviral protection program as well as a network traffic filtering program, a component you don’t offend see included with security software at this sort of price. Together they promise a high level of protection against direct and indirect unwanted software and malware threats.

This is our top choice in our round-up of the Best antivirus software for Mac.

Simple to download, install, and configure after granting the application full access to your Mac’s files, the program then checks for the latest viral definitions, downloads them, and gets to work setting up real-time scanning features as well as intuitive network monitoring that allows you to see and work with both incoming and outgoing Internet connections on your Mac. The software requires macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) or later to install and run, which puts it within easy reach of a number of older Macs as well as the newest ones.

Price

We have a deal right now where you can get Mac Security X9 for $24.99/£20.99 for one Mac for one year. The usual price for the first year is $39.99/£39.99, which then goes up to $49.99/£49.99 a year for subsequent years. The price tiers change depending on the number of devices as well as the length of the subscription.

Get Intego Mac Internet Security X9

Intego’s other products, such as Mac Washing Machine to remove unnecessary and duplicate files, ContentBarrier to filter adult content, Personal Backup, and Intego’s Privacy Protection VPN are available via other bundles, while Mac Security X9 hones on its VirusBarrier and NetBarrier applications. For example, you can purchase Intego Mac Premium Bundle X9 for $39.99/£33.99 for the first year (with a normal retail price of $84.99/£84.99), which includes Mac Washing Machine, ContentBarrier and Personal Backup.

A free and function-reduced version of the virus scanner, see our Intego VirusBarrier Scanner review, is also available in the Mac App Store. If you only occasionally want to check your computer for malware, an interesting alternative to a full-fledged real-time scanner.

Features

While Mac Security X9 doesn’t try to offer every feature under the sun, but what it does is fairly comprehensive and it offers an impressive amount of configuration and customization to both its VirusBarrier and NetBarrier tools.

VirusBarrier does an impressive job of keeping its virus definitions up to date, it offers access to a whitelist/list of trusted files that can be created, it’s easy to quickly scan an external volume such as a USB thumb drive on the fly, scheduled scanning works well, it offers both Quick Scan and Full Scan options, and real-time scanning jumped in every time I mounted an external drive. It can scan every file on any connected disk, including within compressed archives, and it can scan emails and connected iOS devices.

With a virus scanner, the quality of virus detection is crucial, but it’s not only protection against Mac viruses that matters, Windows viruses should also be detected as an important function of the Mac scanner. Annoying adware—such as a malicious program that redirects your browser to advertising pages—should also be tracked down. Intego does all of this, with the detection of Windows viruses improving a lot in recent years.

Suspicious files are quarantined, and these can then be marked as trusted, left quarantined or a repair attempt can be made although repairs may leave the original file usable or may remove all its data.

As for batch testing, VirusBarrier was able to remove just about all the infected files I set in place on my MacBook Pro, leaving only the questionable Free Download Manager behind, which had to be removed manually. It did a sterling job of finding threats on our testbed Mac.

Intego’s NetBarrier is the other part of the Internet Security suite. In our testing, it proved very effective at monitoring and flagging all attempts to communicate out as well as in; it’s a two-way firewall that monitors for ‘phone home’ attempts as well as intrusions. NetBarrier truly impresses and it’s easy to see both incoming and outgoing Internet connections to services such as Apple, various application updaters, Adobe Creative Cloud, Dropbox, and other companies. You’ll be surprised at how much of this network chatter goes on. Adobe Creative Cloud was expected, but even Apple’s Pages wanted to have remote conversations. The vast majority of this is entirely legitimate, but attempts are flagged and you can choose whether to allow them or not.

Similar to previous versions, the NetBarrier application allows you to create settings for your home, work, or public connections and either allow or deny connections as needed. The setup can be as simple or as intricate as desired, and it’s easy to set up rules for each connection wherein the application will allow the connection, block it, or ask for your choice as to what to do with it. A real-time network protection feature can be enabled or disabled as needed, and it’s helpful to see what connections your Mac is processing during standard use.

Performance

Virus scanners have a reputation for severely slowing down a Mac. This is probably because all file actions are monitored by the protection software, including the copying of large files. However, in our experience, this is hardly noticeable on a Mac with SSD. Indeed, the current version of Virusbarrier tested by us had no noticeable influence on system performance in our test.
Performing a complete hard disk scan does take a while the first time this is run, but how long this takes depends on the size of your disk and the number of files and compressed archives that need to be examined; from 30 minutes to over an hour proved to be quite normal. Performance wasn’t noticeably affected in our tests, but if that happens to you there’s a “low priority” scanning choice in its preferences to reduce its processor use. That makes scanning take longer, but it’s there as an option. Further scans are just on new items and generally take a minute or less to run.

While Mac Security X9 proved impressive, there are a few issues to address. A running counter tracks the number of files processed in a VirusBarrier scan, but a timer would also be a helpful user interface element for this. Add in the fact that Free Download Manager remained and had to be manually removed, and although it’s impressive that the application caught dozens of infected files, but this needs to be 100% in the future. Another element that caught my eye and can’t be ignored is that while NetBarrier sets up a Safe Browsing feature within your installed web browsers, it still allows traffic to the questionable websites linked to in the dozens of spam messages that arrive in my mailbox daily offering the usual phishing-based scams, questionable rebates, and bills for services I never subscribed to.

In the June 2023 test by AV-Comparatives, Intego’s Virus Barrier received an “Approved” rating and showed top-notch performance results compared to previous years. According to AV-Comparitives, the app detected 99.4 percent of Mac malware, 97 percent of PUAs (Potentially Unwanted Programs) and 100 percent of Windows viruses, so it can be recommended without restriction. Other solutions beat Intego in AV-Comparatives’ league table, including Avast, AVG, and Trend Micro, but we have reasons to prefer Intego to those options, which tend to be lacking in other areas that we feel are important (such as incessantly advertised upgrades and missing features).

Verdict

To its credit, Mac Security X9 doesn’t try to upsell you as to Intego’s other suites and services as you use it, which given some of its competitors, is saying something. The tools in place are effective, work well, and make this worth your consideration.

Intego Mac Internet Security X9 is our number-one pick in our roundup of the best Mac antivirus software. You can also read about other packages we’ve reviewed in that test.

Original testing by Keith Martin