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Malwarebytes: malware detections on the Mac dropped 38% last year

A new report from Malwarebytes says that Mac detections in 2020 fell a “fair bit”  from the all-time high the company that makes anti-malware software previously reported for 2019, with overall detections decreasing by more than 37%.

This was primarily due to a drop in detections of adware and potentially unwanted programs (PUPs), while malware (mostly backdoors, data stealers, and cryptocurrency stealers/miners) increased by more than 61%. Malwarebytes saw its highest number of Mac detections in the U.S. This is no surprise, as the U.S. is the company’s largest market. However, malware detections only represented 1% of the total Mac detections in the U.S.=S last year. 

Similarly, in most of the countries with a large number of detections— Australia, UK, Canada, France, and others—malware made up less than 55 of the total detection count, according to Malwarebytes. Conversely, a number of countries clustered mostly in Asia and Europe saw a much higher percentage of malware, such as South Korea (18.1%), Ukraine (16.3%), Norway (15%), and the Czech Republic (14.9%). Other top contenders included Greece, Malaysia, United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Austria.

Dennis Sellers
the authorDennis Sellers
Dennis Sellers is the editor/publisher of Apple World Today. He’s been an “Apple journalist” since 1995 (starting with the first big Apple news site, MacCentral). He loves to read, run, play sports, and watch movies.