For the first time, a research carried out by Anti-Virus software offering company Malwarebytes has discovered that the number of cyberattacks on Apple Mac Devices have outpaced the number of cyber threats on Windows PCs.
The security study claims that the number of cyber threats on Macs has increased from 400% in 2019 over 2018. If accounted, the average number of threats on Macs has been detected as 11 when compared to 5.8 threats per PC running on Windows Operating System.
Coming to the malware infection spread, researchers have detected that the year 2019 witnessed a 1% increase in infections from the previous year taking the actual count to 50.5 million.
According to the stats counter, the number of PCs running on Apple’s Mac Operating System has increased from 13.22 percent in Feb’19 to 17.9 percent in Jan’2020. Whereas, the share of Windows PCs is dominating with a 77.36 percent market share.
However, the general notion that cyber threats are equally proportional to the market share of PCs has been proved wrong, as seen as vice versa.
Now, talking about the cyber threats, adware seems to be dominant in this segment as over 17 million instances were recorded in 2019, gone-up from 14.2 million in 2018. This includes evasive techniques by cybercriminals in serving up ads by hijacking browsers, web traffic redirection- which is often found difficult to uninstall.
Malwarebytes has highlighted in its report that hackers are turning immensely sophisticated these days in launching attacks where credentials and data are stolen.
Mentioning specifically about ransomware spread, the malware solutions provider from Santa Clara said that those spreading the file-encrypting malware has mostly targeted cities, schools, and healthcare organizations in 2019.
Note- Malwarebytes released the report on the occasion of “Safer Internet Day” on February 11th,2020 and more details can be found on its official blog.
