Malwarebytes Labs has released its 2020 State of Malware Report. According to the anti-malware software provider, there was “significant rise in the overall prevalence of Mac threats in 2019.” Indeed, malware threats per endpoint on Mac were double those on Windows.
According to the company, data for the study was gathered throughout last year:
“The State of Malware report features data sets collected from product telemetry, honey pots, intelligence, and other research conducted by Malwarebytes threat analysts and reporters from January 1 through December 31, 2019. Data from the previous year is used to demonstrate year-over-year change.”
While the data is limited to information from Malwarebytes customers, it does give us an overview of the malware situation. The company points out the trends could be skewed because some people are using the service for the first time. These newcomers could have “hundreds or thousands” of issues from previous years.
Still, this is an interesting report that shows Mac threats continue to rise.
“We saw a significant rise in the overall prevalence of Mac threats in 2019, with an increase of over 400 percent from 2018. However, part of that increase can be attributed to an increase in our Malwarebytes for Mac userbase.
“To see if that increase reflects the reality of the Mac threat landscape, we examined threats per endpoint on both Macs and Windows PCs. In 2019, we detected an average of 11 threats per Mac endpoint—nearly double the average of 5.8 threats per endpoint on Windows.”
Details
In 2018, there were only 4.8 threats per endpoint on Mac but that has doubled to 11 in 2019. The situation means there were twice as many threats per endpoint compared to Microsoft’s Windows. This does not necessarily mean Windows is more secure than Mac but does show more attacks are coming to Apple’s platform.
In recent years, Mac has seen its market share increase which could be attributed to the threat rise.
If you want to read the full report, you can check it out here.
