A friend of mine emailed me the other day:

I recently installed Windows 8 on my Mac as a virtual machine using Parallels. Do I need to install virus/security software to protect my VM?

Here’s my answer back:

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer: Hell yes!

Longest answer: It’s Windows, ain’t it?

For anti-virus, I just tell people to install Microsoft’s free offering. It works well enough, it’s free, it auto-updates, & it doesn’t use an obscene amount of system resources.