![]() ![]() Over the previous years, macOS saw 92,570 new malware in 2018, 28,949 in 2017, and just 5,208 back in 2016, according to the study.Ītlas VPN says ready made malware is a factor in last year’s big increase:Ĭontributing to this record surge in threats is the fact that new malicious software is now easier to engineer than ever before. Last year new Mac malware discovered amounted to just 55,556, meaning 2020s numbers represent a huge 1,092% increase. That amounted to a total of 674,273 new malware found for Mac but the more interesting and concerning part is the jump from 2019 and previous years. Atlas partnered with AV-TEST on the investigation that showed malicious malware for Mac grew on average by 1,847 new threats each day. But taken into context, that total was less than 1% of the new malware that was discovered for Windows in the same period.Ī new report from Atlas VPN today says that it found a record number of new malware designed for macOS in 2020. He was on the team that developed a lot of the ThinkVantage system management technologies that IBM eventually brought to market.A study looking at new malware found in the wild during 2020 says that threats developed for macOS saw a huge jump – almost 1,100% compared to 2019. Whether AXE will ever become part of a shipping product is unknown, but Welch has some experience turning R&D technologies into IBM brands. Point-of-sale computers or stock-trading machines would be ideal pilot projects, according to Welch. Users who "really never wanted the openness and complexity of the operating environment that they're running," would benefit most from the AXE security model, he said. That's when Welch, the project's manager, hopes to have the software in the hands of an early pilot customer. IBM should have a better understanding of how manageable AXE really is by next year. "The real question is not whether the technology works, but whether it's manageable." "If Microsoft sends out a hotfix, you're probably going to have to re-register those applications," he said. The downside of whitelists, however, is that they can create a management headache because administrators have to get involved every time any software is updated. Other companies, such as SecureWave and Bit9, have taken a similar approach to security, he said. "Whitelists are probably the way to go in the future," he said. ![]() This idea of creating a "whitelist" of authorized applications is going to be more widely adopted by security vendors, because the traditional antivirus technique of blocking known malware is simply becoming too unwieldy, said Yankee Group Senior Analyst Andrew Jaquith. PCs can be configured to allow unknown software to run, but only when approved by the user, or they can set unknown software to run only in a virtual machine environment, where it can't do as much damage to the base operating system. The AXE developers say that because some users may not want to have every piece of software they run on their machine "blessed" by a central IT administrator, they've built some flexibility into the software's design. They could also use AXE to make sure that certain programs were only run on specific machines, or even use AXE techniques to make data unreadable, to keep Word or PowerPoint documents away from prying eyes. Users or administrators could use a variety of techniques, including encryption, to ensure that unauthorized software could not be run without their permission. "We are making every machine a unique OS," said Singh, who added that, at present, AXE works with both the Windows and Mac OS operating system kernels. It simply prohibits any code from running unless it has been pre-configured into a special AXE-friendly format, something the IBM researchers say they can make it virtually impossible for spyware and virus writers to do. Unlike antivirus software, AXE doesn't do this by policing for dangerous software. It then polices every piece of software that is run on the machine, making sure that only authorized code gets used. Thanks to a patented IBM technique, AXE loads special "AXE runtime," software into the central part of the operating system, called the kernel, every time the PC is booted up. The solution? A research project called the Assured Execution Environment, (AXE) which takes a very strict approach to controlling what is run on the computer. ![]() Two years ago, Singh could see that computers were being choked by the growing amount of security and management software they were using, and he and fellow researchers Anurag Sharma and Steve Welch set about developing software that would make PCs more easy to use. The project is the brainchild of researcher Amit Singh, who has been working for several years on techniques to simplify PCs. Researchers at IBM's Almaden Labs have developed a way to keep those nasty worms and viruses from running on computers, without the use of antivirus software. ![]()
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