Those ads aren't from your safari browser - Malwarebytes annual Report

[williamcll]

With more Macs being shipped yearly, it seems to have attracted more malware according to malwarebytes. It should be noted that most of these figures are collected from computers with malwarebytes installed, which is still a minority for mac users.

Quote

We saw a significant rise in the overall prevalence of Mac threats in 2019, with an increase of over 400 percent from 2018. However, since you could argue—validly—that part of this was due to a corresponding increase in the total number of Mac endpoints running Malwarebytes software, it’s more interesting to look at the change in the number of detections per endpoint. Mac detections per endpoint increased from 4.8 in 2018 to a whopping 11.0 in 2019, a figure that is nearly double the same statistic for Windows. This means that the average number of threats detected on a Mac is not only on the rise, but has surpassed Windows—by a great deal. This is likely because, with increasing market share in 2019, Macs became more attractive targets to cybercriminals. In addition, macOS’ built-in security systems have not cracked down on adware and PUPs to the same degree that they have malware, leaving the door open for these borderline programs to infiltrate. Further, for the first time ever, Mac threats appeared at the top of Malwarebytes’ overall threat detections. Two Mac threats—NewTab and PCVARK—showed up in second and third place in our list of the most prevalent detections across all platforms.

Other than that, Hacktools and adware have become more prominent the past year:

Education and services industry remain the most vulnerable to malware

Malwarebytes believes more attacks will be targeted at chromium browsers and Ransomware will become more frequent this year.

 

Source:https://www.techradar.com/news/mac-threats-outpace-windows-for-the-first-time

https://resources.malwarebytes.com/files/2020/02/2020_State-of-Malware-Report.pdf

Thoughts: Having used NOD32 on my old iMac and always have adblockers on, I almost never ran into malware issues. But with hackers maybe shifting focus out of windows I expect new vulnerabilities will be found in the upcoming months.

[Bombastinator]

This seems to happen in waves.  Criminals will largely ignore Mac, and Apple relies on its security through obscurity for a while, they get into the news, criminals start writing more stuff for it even though it’s harder to do, apple reacts, and the cycle repeats. I wonder if it’s gotten easier to do lately.