19 January 2012, 12:28

Report: "several dozen" new threats to Mac OS X in 2011

Mac malware statistics from F-Secure Security specialist F-Secure says that it discovered "several dozen new Mac threats" last year. According to a report from the company's Threat Research team, there were almost 60 new threats to Mac OS X from April to December 2011; these included backdoors, trojans, rogue anti-virus apps and other types of malware.

While the company says that amount is very low when compared to malware on Windows, it notes that "it's definitely something when compared to the number of Mac threats seen prior to 2011". F-Secure, which sells a variety of security products and services such as Anti-virus for Mac, points out that its figures only include unique variants, not the total number of unique binaries or repackaged installers that it found. The company expects "more of the same for 2012".

A spreadsheet called "Mac Threats 2011"(Excel file download), which lists the specific threats and when they were discovered, is available to download from F-Secure.

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