Malware was not a big problem for Mac users in the past years, but as the products became more popular, hackers' interest in them also increased. According to information published today by McAfee, the number of malware infections detected on Macs has increased more than 7 times in a single year.
You can see in the image below how the malware for Mac evolved between Q1 2016 and Q1 2017, with 700.000 infections being detected in the first part of this year. For a platform like Apple's, considered to be extremely secure, this is a serious problem, which should have the attention of those in Cupertino so as not to get out of control.
Most of these malware infections are actually based on adware, that is, the display of advertisements in Mac browsers when surfing the Internet. These are not as dangerous as a standard malware, but the increase in the number of infections suggests that hackers are looking more and more carefully at the operating system of those from Apple.
Making a comparison with Windows, we have 700 million infections there, and what was recorded on the Mac platform represents only 1% of what exists on Windows. Of course, there are far fewer Macs than Windows computers, and this reduces the earning potential of hackers, so they don't bother too much with Apple computers.
