Your best designer swears her Mac can't get hacked. Your Mac is not safe, and neither is hers, because the open door is the app nobody patched, not the logo on the lid. Here is where that myth came from, why it stopped being true, and an hour with me to show you the rest.
Save My Seat →Thursday, July 9, 2 PM ET. No charge, no pitch.
The problem: Someone on your team runs a Mac and shrugs off every warning with four words: it's a Mac. That belief feels like a wall. It is really an open gate, and your Mac is not safe just because it wears an Apple.
The solution: You do not have to win a tech argument to fix this. By the end you will know why "Macs don't get hacked" ever caught on, why it fell apart this year, and three plain things a Mac user can do today.
In this article
Picture your best creative, laptop open at the coffee shop. A weird email lands. She waves it off. "I'm on a Mac, I'm fine." That calm feels earned. It is out of date.
On July 1 this year, a very powerful AI came back online. It is scary good at finding holes in software. Point it at a program and it hunts for weak spots faster than any person could. This is the new normal, and your Mac is not safe from it.
Here is one number that should land. That AI found a flaw in a program called OpenBSD that had sat open for twenty-seven years. It found a break-in bug in a cousin program, FreeBSD, that had sat open for seventeen. This is some of the most carefully checked code on earth, the gold standard, and it still had doors standing open for decades.
The belief did not come from nowhere. Years back, Macs were a small slice of the market. Crooks chase numbers, so they aimed at the bigger pile of Windows machines. Macs also run on a well-built foundation with a good reputation, so they earned a calm name.
Both of those reasons have worn out. Macs are everywhere now, on the desks of owners, executives, and designers. That means money and access, and that is exactly who a scammer wants. The target is not the machine. It is the person holding it.
And that foundation with the good name? Apple built macOS on the very same BSD code where those decades-old holes were just found. Apple itself got the call earlier this year, alerted to a flaw in macOS that one of these AI tools dug up. Even Apple got tapped on the shoulder. "Macs don't get hacked" was always a myth, and this year the myth ran out of room.
When that AI was pointed at software, it broke into weak spots in every major operating system and every major web browser. Not just Windows. Every one. So the "which brand is safer" fight misses the point entirely.
Here's the thing most people miss. The open door is almost never the operating system. It is a third-party app nobody patched. The browser, the PDF tool, Zoom, the design app, the old thing you forgot you installed. Each one is its own program with its own holes.
And macOS updates do not fix those. When your Mac updates itself, it patches Apple's own software and stops there. The browser, the PDF reader, Zoom, and the rest are left to update on their own, and most people never do. Same story on Windows. The open door is the unpatched app, not the logo on the lid.
Your Mac is not safe on autopilot, but these three steps close most of the gap. No card needed, no consultant, and any Mac user on your team can do them before lunch.
Run the macOS update, yes, but do not stop there. Open each browser, the PDF tool, Zoom, and the rest, and update every one by hand. The system update skips them. Those apps are the doors that stay open, so this is the step that matters most.
macOS ships with disk encryption called FileVault, a firewall, and automatic updates. Switch all three on. Add a second login step on email, and stop reusing the same password across sites. None of this costs a dime, and it stops the most common break-ins cold.
This one costs nothing, and it is the hardest. Treat a surprise email or a strange link with the same caution anyone should, Mac or not. Phishing works on any machine, because it tricks the person, not the computer. The shrug is the vulnerability.
Do the first two today and you have shut most of the doors. The third, seeing which doors are still open across your whole shop, is the piece I will walk you through live.
My own father fell for a phishing email. I had spent decades in this field, and it still happened to him. Scammers got remote access to his computer and started hunting for financial documents. My step-mother noticed something was off. I jumped in from a distance and shut it down before they reached his bank logins. We were lucky. We caught it in time.
I have spent more than 35 years watching how these attacks really work, since 1991. FBI InfraGard, and not one client I manage has ever been hit by ransomware. Here is why. It is almost always an app nobody updated, the same forgotten door on a Mac or a Windows box. Seeing those doors is simple once someone shows you how, and that part I made easy.
The first two steps are yours to do today. Finding every open door across your shop is what I will walk you through, live, in plain English. On Windows machines, I run a scan on screen so you watch the doors light up. Reveal-Scan grades your Windows machines today, and a Mac version is not out yet, so for your Macs it is the checklist above plus the habits I teach in the session. The open-door thinking is the same on every machine.
✅ No charge, and nothing to buy on the call.
✅ It is not a pitch-fest. You will leave with real steps whether or not you ever buy a thing.
✅ Plain English. No jargon, and no talking down to you.
✅ Mac users welcome. This is exactly the crowd that thinks it is covered and isn't.
✅ Come live if you can, that is where I answer your questions. Saved a seat but can't make it? I'll send you the replay.
✅ Straight talk. If your setup is in good shape, I will tell you so. No scare tactics.
I believe her, and it proves nothing. A door can stand open for years before anyone walks through it. Those trusted programs had holes for seventeen and twenty-seven years before a machine finally found them. A quiet track record is not a locked door.
An hour now saves a scramble later. And if her Mac and your machines are already in good shape, you will walk away knowing it for sure.
Your Mac is not safe on faith alone, and you don't have to sort it out by yourself. Spend one hour with me and walk away with a short list you can hand to your team, Mac users included, and with the quiet confidence of the owner who stopped guessing. The next surprise email, or the next 2 a.m. worry, becomes a box you already checked. No charge, and it is not a pitch-fest.
Save My Seat →Thursday, July 9, 2 PM ET. No charge, no pitch.
Want this kind of plain-English security news every week? Sign up for Craig's Insider Notes at CraigPeterson.com.
Join thousands of security professionals who receive Craig Peterson's Insider Show Notes and cybersecurity updates.
Join 10,000+ cybersecurity professionals