Apple’s macOS is often seen as somewhat sheltered from garden-variety malware outbreaks meant to steal data or give attackers full remote control of the device. But the reality is that the number of vulnerabilities reported by security researchers has increased consistently over the past couple of years. In 2017, we’ve seen an increase of 28.83% in the number of total reported macOS vulnerabilities compared to 2016.
These vulnerabilities range from Denial of Service (DoS) to code execution and memory corruption, including some that are potentially remotely exploitable and highly critical. Almost 40% of reported DoS vulnerabilities for macOS have been labeled “critical” and can be remotely triggered, with vulnerability scores ranging from 9.3 to 10.
