As some of you may have already seen, we released Malwarebytes Anti-Malware for Mac last week. Prior to the release of the new product, I was of the mindset that Macs were not vulnerable to malware. So what changed my mind?
Doug Swanson, my former CTO at Malwarebytes (and current board member!) e-mailed me about a cool product called AdwareMedic he had found over the weekend. Doug’s grandmother’s computer, a Macbook Pro, had fallen victim to a search hijacker that was redirecting any links she clicked to advertising content. He ran AdwareMedic and all was well in the world. Doug insisted I take a look at the software, and his story certainly left me intrigued.
The next day I had my team reach out to Thomas Reed, the creator of AdwareMedic and famous blog The Safe Mac. Shortly after, Thomas and I were able to connect and he told me about himself as well as why he had created the software; it blew my mind.
Thomas himself had been affected by a search hijacker. He was frustrated and didn’t know where to turn. Software did not exist to help him resolve the problem, so he started to dig in and built AdwareMedic. The story and its eerie similarity to the founding of Malwarebytes is why we decided to acquire AdwareMedic and provide an anti-malware for Mac.
In hindsight, we should have taken the pulse of our userbase sooner. A Mac product was one of the biggest requests on social media and in our support queue and the adware and malware problem is becoming more prominent each day.
Thomas and I will be answering questions on Twitter tomorrow morning at 10 am PT. If you’d like to know more, just ask us a question using the hashtag #MBAMforMac
2 replies on “Why Malwarebytes for Mac”
It’s inevitable that Mac will experience more and more security issues as its market share grows. No doubt the Mac security market will grow exponentially in the next few years, and you should be congratulated for having the foresight to enter this market so early.
Shane, thanks for the kind words. Indeed the problem is going to get worse and it was important we get somebody like Thomas who can help us set the right direction.