Over the past few years, this changed based upon greater level of sophistication by hackers, but also higher Mac prevalence. However, historically speaking Apple was just scene as a safer environment with less risk. The number 40,000 or so is a relatively small number given the millions of laptops sold every quarter (both MacOS and Windows). Hence, the point about greater investment in endpoint intrusion detection. At this point, the consensus among security researchers is that the tools for detection of Malware on M1 aren’t mature and this makes it a potentially attractive place for hackers to invest resources. This will also put the onus on Apple to expand bounty programs and other investments in intrusion detection that can sniff out these types of malware early on. The consideration moving forward for Apple will be to make sure its M1 Mac’s don’t capture a reputation as more vulnerable than Windows OS–as that has always been a differentiator. However, it does raise a question about greater vulnerabilities that could come for those using the new homegrown based M1 Macs. This move to creating M1 specific malware shouldn’t be seen as a surprise, it is the natural evolution. With this transition, threat creators developing malware, adware, and ransomware have seen this as an opportunity to create more pervasive threats for the Mac ecosystem. At this point, many things still need to be run using Rosetta 2. The transition has also required a vast number of developers to work on building versions of their software that run “natively” on M1 to deliver top performance rather than needing to be translated through an Apple emulator called Rosetta 2. This move provided Apple more opportunity to develop specific Mac security protections and features directly into its processors. A Refresher on Apple M1Īpple’s M1 chip represents its big shift away from Intel’s x86 architecture Apple has used since 2005. This malware is designed to deliver an as-yet-unknown payload, and to make it even more interesting, it has a self-destruction mechanism that appears to be capable of removing any trace that it ever existed. What we know so far is that security researchers at Malwarebytes and Red Canary discovered a mysterious piece of malware hiding on nearly 40,000 Macs. However, the new architecture is raising a series of questions about new potential vulnerabilities tied to Apple’s recent transition. In short, Apple threats have been on the rise in recent years, before the M1 came to fruition. Read the full news piece on ABC.Īnalyst Take: Apple long had the reputation of being almost impenetrable from a malware standpoint, while some may argue it was the lower volume compares to Windows OS that often left Mac unscathed. The News: Mysterious malware - that has not yet engaged in malicious activity - has infected nearly 40,000 Mac devices, according to the cybersecurity firm Red Canary, which first detected the threat.
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