Unfortunately, that has begun to change in recent years. The only reason the myth that Macs can’t get infected with malware has persisted is that, until recently, malware has been fairly rare. The switch to a completely new architecture in Mac OS X, in 2001, killed all the old “Classic” Mac malware, but it didn’t take long for more to start appearing, starting with the MW2004 trojan a few years later. Some of the earliest malware affected the first Macs in the mid-1980s.

The first widespread virus was the Elk Cloner virus, which actually infected the Apple II, prior to any PC malware. There has almost always been malware for the Mac. Unfortunately, this old “wisdom” has never been true. Now, on a different topic, can you tell me why Safari is going to a Russian search engine instead of Google? And I keep getting pop-ups telling me to “clean your Mac from junk!” Mac threat landscape Wow, that’s so cool! It’s good to know we’re all safe. Even Apple said so, in their famous Get a Mac ads that aired a decade ago. Mac users have been told for years: Macs don’t get viruses.

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