do i need antivirus for macbook pro 2012

There’s no Security section no antivirus apps appear in the Store’s ‘Discover’ front page. And while, as my correspondent noted, you can find security software in the Mac App Store, it feels as if Apple would rather it wasn’t there. Visit the software section of Apple’s online store, and you won’t find a single security suite stocked. But nor is Apple pushing you to install third-party security software. Its website certainly doesn’t go as far as those old ads, which all but claimed Macs were immune from infection. It’s hard to find anything official from Apple on this topic. Does Apple recommend you install antivirus software? In other words, unless you’re conned into installing something you shouldn’t – which can happen to the best of us – you’re pretty safe on a Mac. This was the first time such a vulnerability had been used to infect Macs in any significant way since 2012.” Affected systems were infected with the older Wirenet and Mokes malware. That is the incident in which Coinbase, and several other cryptocurrency companies, were targeted with malware that infected systems through a Firefox zero-day vulnerability. PCVARK tries to convince you you’ve got a problem on your Mac and, ironically, you can solve it by downloading its crummy system optimiser.ĭon’t get me wrong, you wouldn’t want either of these pieces of software on your Mac, but they’re not the kind of malware that would cripple your computer, either.Īs Malwarebytes’ report states: “Of all the threats seen this year, only one incident involved anything other than tricking the user into downloading and opening something they shouldn’t. NewTab is one of those annoying web browser infiltrators that hijacks web searches and sends them to a different search engine. That sounds alarming, but closer inspection of Malwarebytes’ report shows the true picture is nowhere near as dramatic as those headline figures.īy far the two most prevalent threats on the Mac were pieces of malware called NewTab and PCVARK. That was increase of more than 400% year-on-year. To be precise, Malwarebytes “detected an average of 11 threats per Mac endpoint in 2019 - nearly double the average of 5.8 threats per endpoint on Windows”.

Does that still hold true today (if it were even true then)? Not according to security company Malwarebytes, who last week released a report which claimed Mac threats were growing faster than their Windows counterparts for the first time ever, “with nearly twice as many Mac threats detected per endpoint as Windows threats”.

Do i need antivirus for macbook pro 2012