The Mac is not meeting that bar today.”įederighi went on to explain that Mac users don’t download as much software as iOS users, so if iOS was as open to third-party downloads there would be a real problem for that platform. iOS has established a dramatically higher bar for customer protection. When the judge asked about the fact that Mac users can purchase and download software from various places on the Mac, rather than being limited to the Mac App Store, Federighi said: “Yeah, it’s certainly how we’ve done it on the Mac and it’s regularly exploited on the Mac. He revealed that 130 different cases of Mac malware have affected over 300,000 Macs since May 2020 and admitted that even members of his family had got malware on their Macs. But he didn’t hold much back with regards to the malware situation on the Mac.

It’s not only Malwarebytes that is reporting that viruses on the Mac is something to be concerned about: Apple is too! In May 2021 Apple’s software chief Craig Federighi took the stand at the Apple vs Epic trial and said that: “Today, we have a level of malware on the Mac that we don’t find acceptable.”įederighi made the claim mainly to back up the need for an iOS App Store to protect iPhone and iPad users from malware on those devices. Malware might be falling, at least for consumers, but other kinds of annoying programs continue to increase: “Malware accounted for just 1.5% of all Mac detections in 2020–the rest can be attributed to Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs) and Adware,” said Malwarebytes of 2021. But before you breathe a sign of relief, Malwarebytes stated that the worst kind of malware, namely “backdoors, data stealers, and cryptocurrency stealers/miners, increased by more than 61 percent” in 2020.Īs for 2021, Malwarebytes indicated that “Overall Mac detections decreased by 38%, though Mac detections for businesses increased 31%”. The good news is that in its State of Malware report in 2020 Malwarebytes found that the amount of malware detected on macOS actually decreased by 38 percent.

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