For decades, PCs running some version of Microsoft Windows have been the sites of the bulk of all the world's malware. This dominance makes sense, in light of the respective market shares of Windows, Apple OS X (neé Mac OS) and various Linux- and Unix-based operating systems.
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PCs, Macs and malware
A few years ago, technology analyst Horace Dediu of Asymco created a famous graph charting the evolution of the most popular personal computing platforms. From about 1981 until 2005, the classic combination of Windows running on Intel-based machines ('Wintel') grew precipitously, eventually accounting for well over 90 percent of all Internet-connected devices.
Since 2009, though, Wintel's share has sharply declined as Android, iOS and OS X have all seen substantial growth as consumers and businesses gravitate to more mobile devices. That said, it still rules the roost in the desktop and laptop world. Dediu estimated that in 2015, roughly 21 million Macs will be shipped, compared to more than 285 million Windows boxes.
Microsoft and its partners have made a concerted effort ever since at least Windows XP to overhaul security in its OSes, a commitment that has led to everything from the elaborate permissions system of Windows Vista to the retirement of Internet Explorer in favor of the more modern (and less saddled with security-compromising legacy baggage) Edge browser.
Malware is still an issue on Windows, however (e.g., witness the recent scare with PageFair and the delivery of fake Adobe Flash Player updates to PCs via websites that used its technology). But it has also become a growing problem on OS X, too.
Back in 2012, Trend Micro's Ryan Angelo Certeza discussed how Macs had become more susceptible to various fake antivirus scams as well as the Flashback family of Trojans. The risks to Apple's laptops and desktops have only become more complex and varied since then.
Mac attacks: Why they have become more common
According to a 2015 report from one cyber security vendor, summarized by Business Insider, there have been more attacks against Macs so far in 2015 than in the previous five years combined. The report's coordinators revealed that they had collected more than 1,400 unique OS X malware samples this year.
What's behind the surge in Mac-specific threats? Several trends are at work:
- Market share for OS X has been rising steadily for years. IDC's quarterly PC report for Q3 2014 found that Apple had become the third largest PC vendor within the U.S. after HP and Dell en route to achieving its highest ever share in that country, at 13.4 percent (other estimates put the Mac's share at an even higher level).
- Many enterprises now offer Macs as a option for their workers. As much as 45 percent of them allow OS X in the workplace, a marked shift from the days of Windows monoculture. The spread of bring-your-own-device initiatives may account for some of this new outlook.
- Partnerships between Apple and prominent vendors such as IBM and Cisco have also greatly increased the reach of Macs in the enterprise, both as alternatives to PCs and complements to iPads and iPhones for businesses. IBM itself has reported deploying 1,900 Macs internally each week, with over 130,000 OS X and iOS devices live as of October 2015.
- The 'halo effect' has pushed many people who started with just an iPhone, iPad or other Apple device to consider purchasing their first Mac. Services such as iCloud that foster continuity across iOS and OS X have only increased the incentive to take up a Mac instead of a PC in many situations.
The expanding market share of the Mac has meant that it has become a bigger magnet for cyber attacks. While it has been historically a waste of time for attackers to devote a ton of resources to going after a platform with only a sliver of the overall market, the Mac is not the fringe player it once was.
'This rise in Mac OS X malware comes after several years of rapid OS X market share gains, with 16.4 percent of the market now running OS X, including expanding deployment in the enterprise,' stated the preparers of the aforementioned cyber security vendor's report. 'This represents a growing attack surface for sensitive data, as 45 percent of companies now offer Macs as an option to their employees.'
The specific risks that Macs now face
Exploits on the Mac have been on the rise over the last few years, with several major problems coming to light. For example, the Shellshock vulnerability from 2014 put OS X users a risk due to the reliance of Apple's desktop OS on Bash as its command line interpreter. The issue had been present in Bash for around 22 years at the time of its discovery.
More recently, researchers uncovered what Ars Technica billed as the first ever bootkit for OS X, which could take persistent low-level control of a Mac. Named Thunderstrike, the exploit allowed someone with just a brief window of physical access to install furtive malware on it. An even more menacing threat came to light not long thereafter, with the ability to reflash the BIOS on older Macs by taking advantage of weaknesses in apps such as the built-in Safari Web browser.
Trend Micro has found similar problems across OS X and iOS in recent times. In late 2014, a post on the Trend Micro Security Intelligence Blog by Spencer Hsieh outlined the hypothetical dangers posed by Wirelurker, a novel vector that used a stolen certificate to push malware onto non-jailbroken Macs and iOS devices. While some other media coverage of the threat slightly exaggerated its impact, its emergence still demonstrated what Mac and iPhone/iPad users can run into under certain circumstances, such as in the wake of using pirated, unvetted software.
'What Wirelurker demonstrates is that Macs and iOS devices can become victims of online threats just as Windows and Android devices are if users engage in unsecure behavior,' Hsieh wrote. 'Software piracy has been risky practically from day one. Pirated apps aimed at users with jailbroken devices may also become a popular infection vector. The same can be said for iOS apps as well. No computing platform is 'secure' if its users behave insecurely.'
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Indeed, a good deal of the risks confronting Mac users come from habits and actions that could make it easier for malware to infect the system. For example, disabling the default behavior of Gatekeeper – which out of the box only allows application downloads from the Mac App Store and identified developers – can lead to trouble. Certeza examined similar problems in his 2012 post, including social engineering via channels like Facebook or Twitter as well as suspicious links that lead to compromised websites.
Staying safe on the Mac and elsewhere
Malware isn't a new phenomenon in Apple's ecosystem. Even the Apple II was vulnerable to Elk Cloner, one of the first known self-replicating computer viruses. Later machines were susceptible to everything from the Concept exploit in Microsoft Word to the Renepo anti-firewall threat.
But the growing scale of the Mac market, both in absolute and relative terms, means that today's users will have to be even more vigilant than their predecessors in watching out for threats and risks to their data. Trend Micro offers many cyber security solutions and network defense tools that can be put to work to fend off the most pressing problems on OS X.
Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac is powered by the Smart Protection Network, with constantly updated threat intelligence that can catch malware before it gets out of hand. Accordingly, it protects against identity theft, malicious websites and excessive privacy invasions. Learn more from our official page to help keep your Macs safe.
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On March 24, 2001, the iMac was less than three years old, the iPod was still more than six months away, and Macs ran at astounding speeds of up to 733MHz. But most importantly, Apple on that day released the first official version of Mac OS X, changing the future of its platform forever.
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Though nobody knew it at the time, the release, codenamed Cheetah, was the first step in transforming Apple from a company poised on the verge of disaster into the second most valuable company in the world.
Were you to engage in a flight of fancy, you might call Mac OS X the deliverance for the tenacious few that had held onto Apple in the dark times, through the era when the Mac product line had proliferated into a writhing, seething mass of cryptic models in a seeming attempt to out-PC the PC makers. Mac OS X was a sign that the direction of the company had really and truly changed, after years of failed attempts to modernize the Mac OS.
The coup of Mac OS X, more than anything else, is that it shipped. The road to a new version of the Mac OS was littered with the unmarked graves of projects that had gone before: Taligent. Copland. Gershwin.
Despite the early release of a public beta with its own radical changes, that first shipping version of Mac OS X was far from perfect: It couldn’t play DVDs or burn CDs; performance was often sluggish; and the interface was distinctly different—and in many ways cruder—than its predecessor. But Apple does as it always does: it rolls. And over the following years, the company issued update after update, both minor and major, improving the system in a multitude of ways while slowly winning over converts from both the PC and the classic Mac OS.
Ten years later, Mac OS X is still by no means perfect. Ask any Mac user, and I guarantee that, without hesitation, they’ll draw up a list of things that annoy them about the operating system they use every day. But were you to plot the satisfaction of most Mac users on an entirely unscientific graph, I’d boldly wager you’d find it trended upward over time.
To me, there’s no greater testament of Mac OS X’s success than my own friends and family. In the ’90s, the majority were PC users and even those few that had stuck by the Mac soon moved to what they saw as the greener pastures of PCs—if for no other reason than they were far more affordable than the Macs of that age. But now, ten years after the release of Mac OS X, they’re far more likely to be packing an aluminum MacBook than a cheap plastic Dell. Though that might not be a feat to lay solely at the feet of the operating system—Apple’s emphasis on hardware design, Microsoft’s numerous missteps, and my own repeated entreaties probably contributed—it’s hard to argue that Mac OS X didn’t play a major role.
Not just because it dragged Macs into the modern era, with long-awaited features like preemptive multitasking and protected memory, previously the domain of its competitors. After all, the vast majority of computer users probably couldn’t tell you what either of those even means. No, they came to the Mac because as Apple improved Mac OS X, it stuck to an underlying philosophy: the operating system isn’t an end unto itself; it’s about making it as easy as possible to use computers to do things.
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That’s the same philosophy that Apple has taken with the iPhone and the iPad, and to my mind it’s the reason that those products have met with such overwhelming success. Frankly, it’s hard not to see the impact of Mac OS X on most of the major decisions Apple has made in the past decade, whether it be the importance of iTunes, the transition to Intel processors, or the development of iOS devices—which, after all, are based on the same OS X underpinnings as the Mac.
As we embark upon Mac OS X’s second decade, the Mac’s operating system is about to undergo another major shift, perhaps no less significant than that from the classic Mac OS. In the forthcoming Mac OS X Lion, the student becomes the teacher: Apple is beginning to fold features from its iOS devices back into the Mac OS, taking its desktop computer software down a new and very different path.
While those changes have worried some—especially those who have long been invested in Mac OS X—progress, good or bad, is inevitable. The Mac OS X of ten years hence is going to be as different from today’s Snow Leopard as Snow Leopard is from Mac OS X 10.0, but at its core, that future Mac OS X is going to be rooted in those same fundamentals of getting technology out of our way so we can get on with our lives.
As always, the proof will be in the using. But if I may return to my thoroughly unscientific hypothetical graph from above, I’d pose an estimated guess that a decade down the road, that line of satisfaction will continue to trend upwards, and we’ll all be looking back on the Mac OS of 2011 and shaking our heads at what we were missing.
[Dan Moren is a senior associate editor at Macworld, and a Mac OS X user since the year 2000.]