Hundreds of thousands versus tens of millions of units
In the past year, the number of malware and other malicious software on Apple Mac computers increased, however, according to this indicator, computers running the Windows operating system “lead” by a wide margin.
Malware on Mac has grown by 1000% over the year. Windows is still far away
Security researchers at AV-TEST found 674,273 new malware samples for macOS in 2020. In 2019, they identified a total of 56,556 samples, and 92,570 samples in 2018. Over the past year, the number of malware for this platform has increased more than tenfold. In addition, much more unique malware was detected, indicating that malware developers are turning their attention to Macs.
It is noteworthy that in the period from 2012 to 2019, AV-TEST specialists identified only 219,257 samples of malware for this platform. Despite the fact that the number of malware on Mac is growing rapidly, this platform is still very far from Windows. The same company found that 91 million malware samples were created for the Microsoft platform in the past year, an all-time high. The previous record was recorded a year earlier.
Based on this data, Windows malware developers created an average of 250,000 new threats every day. For the Mac, fewer than 2,000 new threats were created per day.
