They also gain entry via popular software like Adobe Flash or other legitimate pieces of software that Apple has already approved. Those items can sneak in, thanks to hackers who steal authentic Apple digital signatures from professional developers or when hidden inside email attachments.

Some Mac viruses and trojans don't alert the user about what they are doing. You might want to run a scan and make sure that your Mac hasn’t been infected, then delete the offending malware, ransomware, or another piece of malicious software. Unexpected behavior is always a red flag. Watch for a Mac that is starting to unexpectedly slow down, overheat, or just plain act strangely. How can I find out if my Mac is infected? Luckily, the ways of removing malware from Mac have improved over the last years, too. So it can be said that malware is any software that performs tasks you wouldn’t have authorized yourself. Malware in 2022 can be used for anything from monitoring keystrokes to using your machine’s processing power and network access to mining cryptocurrency without your knowledge.

Now, malware can be many things, and often doesn’t do harm to your machine or network at all. That used to be fairly easy to narrow down, as malware was meant to actually destroy a computer by overclocking it or adding more malware to slow the machine down until it was useless. A basic definition of malware is it’s any software meant to do harm to your computer, server, or network.

How to find malware on mac