As mentioned in our review of MacScan last month, a growing number of malware and viruses are targeting mac users. We have therefore expanded the numbers of reviews of security products for Mac.

VirusBarrier X5 is an anti-virus product to protect not only your Mac computer but also your iphone and itouch from malware.

Installation was straight forward, and the first thing we noticed is the interface is made up of a bright green dashboard. Although different from standard Mac applications, it is straightforward to use. VirusBarrier X5 scans can be scheduled either daily,monthly,,at a time of your choosing, or manually.

VirusBarrier X5 manual and automated scans can be configured by drive, type of documents, applications, emails and folder selection. The first time scan will take longer then subsequent scans as a turbo mode is used to record information from previous scans. If a virus is found, VirusBarrier X5 can either move the infected file to a quarantine zone, repair automatically or alert the user, in addition results can be stored to a folder or emailed to an external account.

All activities, either virus scans performed or viruses found are logged, which can be exported to a folder as either text, xml or html formats on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

We found that the first full scan of a hard drive to a while (about 2 hours) but the later scans (test drive was conducted on a full 120GB hard drive) took about an hour due to the turbo mode. (results may vary dependant on your computer configuration)

Virusbarrier X5 provides a real time scanner, to protect your computer from virus as applications are started or new files are downloaded, opened and/or installed. The Real-time scanner can be disabled manually until reboot or manual restart (which requires password authentication). The real-time scanner can be configured to exclude certain folders, file types or emails to minimise the impact of performance, which we did find can slow down by a couple of seconds the initialisation of applications.

Updating of the Virusbarrier X5 software is set up during installation through its NetUpdate feature, this can be scheduled either daily, weekly or monthly and configured to be updated as a background process.