That urban legend that Macs don’t need protection against viruses and so on, is just that. A legend. Like all other operating systems, they need protection. If possible, Macs need a little more, because thanks to that ill-formed legend, the friends of others want at all costs to violate macOS in order to carve out a hole in history. But it’s getting harder and harder. This year the company has added important improvements thanks to the XProtect tool which according to analysts and specialists, has been implemented with greater force.
Apple has its own tools to prevent certain viruses and other software from spoiling (to put it mildly) our daily work with the Mac. Right now we only have the XProtect tool left, which has come with much more force this year 2022. Some researchers and specialists in the field have determined that the improvements that Apple has implemented in this tool are very powerful.
Introduced in 2009 in macOS X Snow Leopard together with the Malware Removal Tool (MRT), right now we can only talk about the first (since macOS Monterey 12.3) that has absorbed the second with the intention of protect our tasks on the Mac to the maximum.
The investigator Howard Oakley The Eclectic Light Company (via ArsTechnica) has been researching both tools for some time to get an idea of how Apple keeps our Macs secure. He claims that new improvements have made the tool evolve more in months than in 7 previous years. XProtect scans the Mac at least once a day: During periods of low user activity. The frequency may change depending on the situation, and the malware scan may run every hour. Without a doubt, what this achieves is that it is more difficult to attack Macs and their users by extension.
So Macs aren’t invulnerable, but since the beginning of this year and thanks to Apple’s silent update to the XProtect tool, they are a bit safer.
