Nothing has happened to me, and it's been 2 years.
People keep harping on about the fact that viruses for OSX do exist. I don't dispute that. But realistically, outside of virus labs and white hat conferences, has anyone experienced or witnessed a Mac virus in the wild?
Ditto the above question to any other *nix users as well.
How do you know? Modern day viruses and root kits go out of their way to make things look "business as usual"
But of those infected systems, we see relatively few that have truly sneaky, invisible-to-the-user malware. Far more that's just a gigantic pain in the ass to remove as it's hooked into everything in order to display ads at the user or rewrite links or shoddy code has destroyed one or more browser or OS components.
On my VPS's I always assume I was already compromised. I never trust my system in current state until I do all the checks including analysis of my logs. I have automated this into certain level but you can never know :-)
People I work with used to say that it is only a matter of time somebody will try something you have not thought about - to be prepared for such situations is the key. But that's just my private opinion.
Yes, my shop has had several legit malware removals for Macs, most of them were either Mackeeper or Genieo (or its variants), which was probably installed beginning with a malicious ad on some site the user was visiting.
(I'm not disputing that the situation for Mac users is still significantly better than for Windows users though.)
I started out with AdBlock Plus, switched to AdBlock, and now I'm using uBlock.
I guess that rules out browser-based exploits doesn't it? Since the browser is one of the few ways where attackers can automatically detect your system and deliver an OS-specific virus.
It redirected users to a compromised site, which used JS to load a Java applet containing an exploit that was already patched in the official Java, but not in the default version that comes pre-installed on Macs. The applet tricked you into installing "Flash" on your system.
- Adblock would've stopped the JS from executing in the first place - We'd definitely have the latest Java versions - I uninstalled Flash ages ago, and use Chrome's built in player instead, and certainly wouldn't install it from a site that isn't Adobe
Apple themselves have learnt from the incident, and have been speeding up Mac releases of pre-installed software since then.
The possible attack vectors against modestly capable Mac users are quite low..I simply don't see it happening. Unless I'm being targeted by institutional/state hackers. In which case I doubt AV would do much good.
Social engineering and poor passwords are likely to be a much bigger threat than malware.