The Mac enjoys an easier time in security because Apple’s product is a less juicy target. Malware and viruses are designed to make money for criminals, and the number of PCs out there running bareback is 10 times the number of Macs. Security by obscurity only works until it doesn’t. It’s just a matter of time, sad to say, before the criminals fan out and try to rob your system of power or privacy or both.

Anti-virus software (AV) is not just the paranoid geek’s tool anymore. The last virus we detected came off a Web page, and we last had data corrupted in 1997. But things have changed since Apple moved to Unix underneath it’s OS. Oh, and there’s that thing called the Internet, plus the Flash videos you may use to gather research (like from the Wall Street Journal’s site, now that they’re owned by Fox.) Flash, and Adobe’s Acrobat PDF files, are a big target for malware today.

You have more than one choice for a commercial AV tool for your systems (that wasn’t the case in ’97). What you buy probably should provide both firewall and virus protection. Two leading companies offer very different value propositions in their AV software. MacScan commits to a fixed price, while another supplier uses a subscription fee+purchase price model.

Today we look at MacScan, software built by a company that started tracking viruses in 2002 on the Mac. For five years MacScan didn’t even sell software; it simply created the definition files and patrolled the Web for criminal weapons. Since ’07 they’ve sold MacScan, which despite claims from its competitor Intego, still looks like a worthy value for AV.

Intego, whose products we’ve run at Bites HQ for more than three years, now sells a $49.95 X6 edition of VirusBarrier that protects two Macs. The MacScan 2.7 software protects three systems for the same price. (There’s also a 1-Mac license for MacScan for $29.95; Intego sells only its 2-Mac license.) Figuring the relative value requires you to consider the protection scope of such products. MacScan’s product manager told us at Macworld that the company ships along regular updates of the virus profiles, at no extra charge.

MacScan makes a significant point of examining Web cookies, a source of malware targets, in its regular process. A half-full iMac in our offices took more than an hour to probe with MacScan, but the AV software found nine tracking cookies in the first minute. And no viruses or other spyware. We got an option to disable these ad cookies after MacScan caught them.

A tracking cookie is not something you allow easily into your Mac. While you might not want to erase all of them, these are used by advertisers on Web sites to track your Internet use: where you browse, how you jump from links, even the information you enter into forms online. A fine article on the World Privacy Forum’s Web site explains that “allowing the tracking types of cookies to follow you around as you surf the Web is a lot like building a see-through house to live in, click by click.”

MacScan doesn’t reach any deeper into the malware world, though. It’s good at finding troublesome files on the system, but it won’t do a thing to block access to your computer. Apple’s firewall is the default for the MacScan user. While that’s better security than none, it might not be enough to keep prying spooks from hijacking your bandwidth.

Doing one thing well, and affordably, is noble and true to the Macintosh Way. We like to see more of what back doors might be open on our Macs, however. The extra features of firewall improvement are included with the new VirusBarrierX6. But they’re not easy to use, or so valuable that Intego could keep selling this super firewall that it once called NetBarrier as a standalone product. That’s for Monday, though.