Moonlock Lab, MacPaw’s malware investigators, say they’re already seeing clear signals of how macOS malware will evolve this year.
The team identified key macOS cyber threats Mac users should beware of and summarized them in 6 macOS malware trends to watch in 2026. If 2025 was about scale, 2026 will be about staying invisible. macOS malware won’t look like malware at all — it will look trusted, familiar, and routine, they say. A few highlights from the research:
° AI will become a bigger issue as LLMs turn into part of the attack surface. Experimentation with LLM-injection techniques will increase — attackers manipulate the data AI systems consume, poisoning the sources LLMs summarize or recommend.
° Apple-notarized apps won’t necessarily mean they are safe. Threat actors are leaning harder into Apple’s trust signals, fragmenting malware into quieter stages and complicating analysis and attribution.
° macOS stealers will increasingly target enterprise access, harvesting SSO sessions and authentication cookies, developer and CI/CD credentials, cloud and API keys, and other sensitive data, all while maintaining persistent backdoor access.
Check out the full research for more discoveries and insights.
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