The new McAffee June 2017 Threat Report is in and it indicates that the trend in Mac malware isn’t slowing down. There were nearly 250,000 new instances of macOS malware in the first quarter of 2017, bringing the total for the quarter to just over 700,000.
While Macs have never been fully immune to viruses and exploits, they generally weren’t as susceptible to the viruses that plagued Windows PC in the first decade of the 2000s. Since then, Apple has backed off from its “Macs don’t get viruses” marketing claim.
At present, traditional PC-like viruses are still relatively rare on the Mac, but according to McAfee, there’s been a “glut of adware”, which tricks users into downloading, running, and authorizing malware with admin privileges. Depending on the malware and its attack vector, the users of infected Macs encounter everything from browser takeovers, to pop-up ads, to unwanted toolbars and browser plugins, to even things like keyloggers and botnet hijacks in the worst cases.
Macs currently represent about four percent of the computing market and account for less than one percent of identified malware.
As always, concerned Mac users can take steps to protect themselves, via operating system and web browser updates, using Gatekeeper to protect yourself from uncertified apps, keeping an offline backup of your data, and never downloading or running applications (especially those that require admin rights) from unknown or sketchy sources.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.
Via The Mac Observer and McAfee