#Windows vs mac os data windows#
Windows continues to have around 80% of the market share, but macOS keeps getting more popular. A link in a phishing email opens just the same on any OS, and studies show that criminals greatly value data coming from macOS and iPhone owners.
When people think about OS security, they imagine dangerous malware affecting their devices, but social engineering is a lot more prevalent these days, and it doesn't really matter what OS you're running. While this is what they're most known for publicly, they have also reportedly sold zero-day vulnerabilities to governments and other interested parties, including for macOS.
#Windows vs mac os data android#
More recently, we noticed the advent of spyware named Pegasus from an Israeli security company called NSO Group, targeting Android and iOS ecosystems. The attacker developed an entirely new approach and created a piece of malware with more spying features than the ones available on other platforms. Let's take the example of APT28, also known as Fancy Bear, a hacking group likely attached to Russia's General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU). The platform is just as vulnerable to determined hackers as any other. It's tempting to think that macOS's architecture is protected, but when there's enough interest and resources behind a criminal group, the OS is no longer that safe. Targeted, state-sponsored attacks do not discriminate According to this deposition, Apple found and removed about 130 different kinds of malware on Macs last year that had infected hundreds of thousands of user systems. "Today, we have a level of malware on the Mac that we don't find acceptable and that is much worse than iOS," Federighi said.
#Windows vs mac os data install#
Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, explained during a trial in California that macOS is a lot more vulnerable than iPhone because the company allows users to install apps that haven't been vetted. Now, the platform is much more attractive, which is why we've seen a lot of interest in exploiting vulnerabilities and why there's more malware capable of affecting this OS.Īpple itself acknowledges that security on macOS is a much bigger problem than previously admitted. Today, macOS has around 14-15 percent of the market share, which is a significant increase.
The truth was that macOS's security was a combination of a good platform architecture and attackers' lack of interest to invest time and resources into malware that would only affect a small percentage of the user base. Ten years ago, macOSes market share hovered around 3-4 percent, which coincidently likely also represented the percentage of attackers interested in developing malware and threats for this platform. Market share drives most of the threat landscape If there's anything that Windows and macOS have in common, attackers are always looking for ways to make their attacks platform agnostic. The sheer quantity of threats, the evolution of malware and types of attacks, and the number of people involved in this illegal endeavor soared. Security changed a lot in the past decade, both in terms of attack and defense. The reasons why macOS is perceived as safer (sometimes rightly so – take as an example the missing ransomware problem on macOS) don't necessarily have anything to do with the technologies used. Which one is the safest? That's the age-old question about Windows and macOS security, and answering it in a definite manner is not possible because of the fluidity and the ever-changing nature of the threat landscape.Īpple built much of macOS's reputation on security, and the debate between Windows and macOS users has been raging since the beginning of time.
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