3 ms·

I'd imagine that using an adblock decreases your chances of being exposed to a virus by an order of magnitude. (That being said, I have never seen an OSX virus

• pcr0 11y ago
  I just googled it, actually. The top result was [Flashback](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_BackDoor.Flashback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_BackDoor.Flashback). Infected 600k at its height, but as of Jan 2014, there were only about 20k infected computers. 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.