Security firm: malware for OS X is booming

The number of malware cases for OS X is growing rapidly. That’s what security company Bit9 + Carbon Black claims. In an analysis, the company found 948 cases of malware this year in 2015, five times as many as over the last five years combined.

In the years 2010 to 2014, the analysis revealed a total of 180 cases of malware, the security company writes in its report. With the 948 samples of malware in 2015, the growth is therefore solid and the company attributes this to the growth in the use of OS X among consumers and especially companies, which means that more interesting information can be retrieved with malware.

While the number of malware cases has grown, they are becoming less sophisticated. It also appears that the new malware is largely inspired by Windows malware, rather than malware for Unix and Linux, operating systems more closely related to OS X than Windows.

Malware for OS X abuses LaunchAgents and BrowserPlugins, among other things, to do its job, the analysis shows. The best-known OS X malware of the past year is XCodeGhost, a malware-infected version of Xcode on Chinese servers, which caused apps for OS X and iOS to receive malware when compiled. The security company does not report how much malware there is relative to Windows machines or how many Mac users are victims of malware on their systems.