The number of malware that can infect Mac computers has increased significantly last decade (2010-2019), particularly scams (including tech support scams) and fake anti-malware apps. since when malware for Mac computers did exist?
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8Instead of accepting the first answer that appears, please wait 24 hours between posting your question and accepting an answer. As you can see, a better answer (Raffzahn's) has been posted. Thanks! – DrSheldon Feb 22 '20 at 18:40
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The first viruses for Mac were targeting Hypercard. The first Hypercard virus appeared in about 1991. Hypercard has a scripting language called HyperTalk, which was powerful enough to perform file-system accesses, thus allowing Hypercard viruses to discover and spread to other stacks (HyperCard "documents").
answered Feb 21 '20 at 22:33
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4Raffzahn answer links to an Hypercard virus from 1988. Do you have a reference for 1991 being the first one? – Cœur Feb 22 '20 at 12:24
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Raffzahn is correct. I forgot about Dukakis. Three Tunes was 1991. – peter ferrie Feb 29 '20 at 1:00
The very first virus might have been
- nVir of 1987
Although technically not one, nVir worked much like a boot sector virus. Its source code did circulate on BBSes very soon after, leading to short flooding of copies. Still the damage was rather small. Not much later
- HyperAvenger of 1988 (also called Dukakis-Virus)
made its debut. It was based on HyperCard and became much more visible than nVir - after all, HyperCard was kind of a hype at the time.
During the mid 1990s a series of Word- and Excel-Macro virii did plague the Mac community.
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6I was involved in Mac support from about that time and nVir is the first one I remember encountering. – Francis Davey Feb 22 '20 at 16:16
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4"Virii" is a plural for "virius" (if there were such a noun). Plural for "virus" in English is "viruses", see this thread. – Ruslan Feb 23 '20 at 9:35
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1It took years of therapy to be able to forget about the Office Macro virii. Years. 😼 – IconDaemon Feb 24 '20 at 1:53
