> For me it was strange how can Apple market their system as virus-free. Now that's ridiculous.
Not really. I've been using Macs for as long as I can remember (I'm 30), and in that entire time, I've only ever actually seen 2 pieces of malware myself (I've heard of others but never actually encountered them). One of them was the rather benign Merry Xmas Hypercard trojan from way back, which doesn't actually harm your computer, all it does is search for other hypercard stacks on your computer to infect, and if you open an infected stack on December 25th it will play sound and wish you a Merry Xmas. The other one was one of those Adware apps, I forget its precise name, and I didn't actually even see that, I talked with someone else on the phone who had it and walked them through the instructions at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203987 for removing it.
And just to note, the latter one isn't even a virus, because it's not self-replicating (the former one technically is, because it infects other stacks on the same computer, but it was pretty darn benign and did not rely on an OS security flaw to operate).
So yeah, there exists malware for the Mac, and there's more of it now than there ever has been in the past, but it's like a completely different universe from Windows malware. You pretty much have to go out of your way to hit this on the Mac.
As an aside, the first widely-spread Mac malware I ever heard of was spread via a pirated copy of iWork '09 being distributed on BitTorrent. Someone had altered the DMG to include the virus before uploading it. It was kind of funny hearing about people being infected because you knew the only way they could have done that was by trying to pirate iWork '09 (this was the only distribution vector). And even that apparently doesn't count as a "major" security threat because the Wikipedia page[1] for Mac Defender, which is dated to May 2011, describes Mac Defender as "the first major malware threat to the Macintosh platform", even though it wasn't even a virus it was just a trojan (and FWIW it didn't even require antivirus software to remove, Apple rolled out an automatic fix themselves, although it did take them a few weeks to do so).
Not really. I've been using Macs for as long as I can remember (I'm 30), and in that entire time, I've only ever actually seen 2 pieces of malware myself (I've heard of others but never actually encountered them). One of them was the rather benign Merry Xmas Hypercard trojan from way back, which doesn't actually harm your computer, all it does is search for other hypercard stacks on your computer to infect, and if you open an infected stack on December 25th it will play sound and wish you a Merry Xmas. The other one was one of those Adware apps, I forget its precise name, and I didn't actually even see that, I talked with someone else on the phone who had it and walked them through the instructions at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203987 for removing it.
And just to note, the latter one isn't even a virus, because it's not self-replicating (the former one technically is, because it infects other stacks on the same computer, but it was pretty darn benign and did not rely on an OS security flaw to operate).
So yeah, there exists malware for the Mac, and there's more of it now than there ever has been in the past, but it's like a completely different universe from Windows malware. You pretty much have to go out of your way to hit this on the Mac.
As an aside, the first widely-spread Mac malware I ever heard of was spread via a pirated copy of iWork '09 being distributed on BitTorrent. Someone had altered the DMG to include the virus before uploading it. It was kind of funny hearing about people being infected because you knew the only way they could have done that was by trying to pirate iWork '09 (this was the only distribution vector). And even that apparently doesn't count as a "major" security threat because the Wikipedia page[1] for Mac Defender, which is dated to May 2011, describes Mac Defender as "the first major malware threat to the Macintosh platform", even though it wasn't even a virus it was just a trojan (and FWIW it didn't even require antivirus software to remove, Apple rolled out an automatic fix themselves, although it did take them a few weeks to do so).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Defender