October 2019 • Macworld 81BUYING GUIDEfrom a Mac security site representing most malware
targeting the Mac from 2018 until the first quarter
of this year. Because placing these onto a ‘live’
system represents an obvious security risk, we
unleashed them within a virtualized Mac running
on VMware Fusion, with macOS Mojave installed.
This VM was assigned four CPU cores, plus 8GB
of RAM, so represents an average Mac system.
Notably, we did not actively infect the system
with this malware. This is generally impossible
because of Apple’s XProtect technology that’s
built into macOS that blocks the majority (if not all)
malware for the Mac.
Instead we simply placed the malware sample
files on the disk by extracting them from password‑
protected archives. This was enough for mostWe used a MacBook Pro running
macOS Mojave as our test systemOctober 2019 • Macworld 81BUYING GUIDEfrom a Mac security site representing most malware
targeting the Mac from 2018 until the first quarter
of this year. Because placing these onto a ‘live’
system represents an obvious security risk, we
unleashed them within a virtualized Mac running
on VMware Fusion, with macOS Mojave installed.
This VM was assigned four CPU cores, plus 8GB
of RAM, so represents an average Mac system.
Notably, we did not actively infect the system
with this malware. This is generally impossible
because of Apple’s XProtect technology that’s
built into macOS that blocks the majority (if not all)
malware for the Mac.
Instead we simply placed the malware sample
filesonthediskbyextractingthemfrompassword‑
protected archives. This was enough for mostWe used a MacBook Pro running
macOS Mojave as our test system