When something suspect was found that couldn’t be cleaned it was quarantined’ items that have been moved to quarantine items can be examined and restored or deleted as you prefer. Still, the most important thing is catching unwanted items. We would have preferred a more detailed report than just the number of items dealt with knowing exactly what had been found and where could be very useful. When Total Protection finds threats it will default to fixing them automatically, which is a very good thing. The main part of this revolves around the real-time and scheduled scans for threats and unwanted software, with the browsing security and firewall (when it is updated) being cherries on top. The Total Protection interface is exceptionally simple. This feature wasn’t ready for Big Sur at the time of testing but it performed as expected in Catalina, and this should be updated by the time you read this. Going back to the Mac software, Total Protection’s Firewall adds another layer of protection for both incoming and outgoing traffic. This provides threat scanning, a VPN and browser security, a code-protected media vault, and options for tracking if the iPhone is mislaid and erasing if it’s stolen.
If you buy a multiple-device licence, your iPhone can get in on the protection action as part of the Total Protection subscription you can install the McAfee Security iOS app. This is also available separately as a free plugin for Firefox, Chrome and Edge, but in this form it’s browser-independent.
WebAdvisor is an additional feature that identifies unsafe sites and issues warnings or actually blocks them from loading. If that’s not convenient you can simply edit the day and time, and the frequency options are daily, weekly, monthly or never – that last being one we don’t advise choosing of course. The default is to scan once a week at 4am, which means your Mac must be on at that time.
You can schedule full scans of your Mac to happen on a regular basis. Those options can be enabled easily, but you can leave that to the scheduled full scan, which runs with its own set of options and does default to that more in-depth examination. By default it doesn’t look inside compressed files, Apple mail messages or networked volumes, as that would require a more intensive examination that would affect general performance. Total Protection’s real-time scanning feature will monitor your Mac in the background as you work. McAfee’s Total Protection is a utility that is dedicated to protecting your Mac against unwanted software activity, including browser hacks and intrusion attempts as well as watching for unauthorised software running on your own Mac.