Threats to macOS grow 400% in a year: more than double that of Windows

It is a misleading but generally widespread thought that Mac systems are safer and less prone to be contaminated with malware than their Windows PC counterparts. A new Malwarebytes report highlights, that for the first time ever, threats targeting Mac systems have grown much more than those dedicated to PCs, practically at a double rate.

The Malwarebytes report indicates that during 2019 the volume of threats addressed to Mac systems grew by 400%. To determine this, the company calculated the number of threats per endpoint on both Mac OS and Windows.

The result? In 2019, the company detected an average of 11 Mac endpoint threats compared to 5.8 Windows endpoint threats. Compared to 2018, threats increased from 4.8 to 11. Malewarebytes believes that the reason is the growth of the market share of the Mac platforms: the greater the number of Apple users, the more this platform becomes attractive for the bad guys.

In the report, Malwarebytes notes that the security measures integrated with macOS still cannot adequately address the threats posed by adware and PuPs, the Potentially Unwanted Programs. Precisely for these reasons, the threats that hit Mac systems are quite different from those addressed to Windows PC. While the latter is more easily exposed to ” traditional ” malware, the main threats for Mac are adware and PuPs.

The latter are those ” cleaning ” applications such as MacKeeper and MacBooster, while on the adware side, it is NewTab to be at the top of the list: it is an adware family that redirects browser searches to earn from affiliate systems illegal and is often spread through bogus pages for tracking flights or shipments.

Adware remains a significant problem for Windows too, with around 24 million detections on PC: this is a growth of 13% for consumers and 463% for businesses. And seven of the top ten consumer threats detected are a variant of adware.

More details can be found on the Malwarebytes report.