Thus far this yr we’ve seen a couple of stories about malware that’s affecting Macs. Now Elastic Safety Labs has launched its spring 2023 International Risk Report. It affords a big-picture have a look at the state of malware together with how typically it’s impacting Mac vs Home windows and Linux, the commonest malware total, the commonest malware on Mac, and extra.
Trying throughout Home windows, Linux, and Mac, Elastic’s newest analysis discovered that Trojans have been the commonest kind of malware making up over 75% of the whole. Cryptominers and ransomware have been the following two frequent classes.
As for the distribution of malware discovered, roughly 54% of all situations have been discovered on Linux endpoints, with ~39% taking place on Home windows methods.
Simply 6% of the malware detections have been discovered on Macs.
Whereas Malwarebytes earlier this yr shared a report exhibiting adware as probably the most prevalent kind of malware on Mac, Elastic says that it discovered cryptominers because the dominant malware on Mac with a sprinkle of Rootkit exhibiting up for early 2023.
Right here’s a better have a look at its findings for macOS on the left-hand facet:
And for the commonest cryptominers discovered on Macs, XMRig accounted for nearly 40% of situations.
Elastic highlights that XMRig may very well be used deliberately or legitimately, however it’s broadly utilized by malicious events.
And Elastic believes that using cryptominers in opposition to Macs may very well be on the rise:
It must be famous that the distribution and victimology of macOS cryptominers might grow to be more and more in style and builders leverage MacOS and JavaScript for work-related duties. Since Node Package deal Supervisor (NPM) is a typical bundle supervisor for JavaScript, cryptominers may very well be distributed in malicious packages to macOS endpoints
The full 2023 report contains extra particulars on Home windows, Linux, cloud safety developments, and extra.
In associated information, we just lately noticed what seems to be the primary ransomware designed particularly for Apple Silicon Macs from the LockBit gang:
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