Mac users warned of growing virus threat
Attacks on the Mac are now significant enough to warrant Apple users investing in an anti-virus product, security company Panda Security said as it launched a new product that offers such protection.
Marketing spin to harvest the Apple economy or justified caution? Panda points to the numbers. There are now 5,000 ‘strains’ of malware that target the Mac and the company says it is seeing 500 new Mac-specific samples appearing every month.
In 2009, 34 vulnerabilities were detected in Apple’s OS X, which had risen to 175 so far for 2010, with a 20-year total of 170,000 macros ‘viruses’ affecting the platform. To be clear, such security threats relate only to Apple desktop and laptop computers and not iPads of iPhones, which are only vulnerable if they have been ‘jailbroken’ or if, somehow, a rogue app breaks through the approval process.
