As a Mac malware specialist, I’ve seen more than my share of folks saying “Macs don’t get viruses” over the years. I’ve seen and experienced first-hand that this isn’t true—even on iOS, where despite having tight, built-in security, iPhones are still capable of getting infected by rare malware. I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised, then, when I hear someone claim that “viruses on Chrome OS don’t exist.”
Although it’s certainly true that
viruses—the class of malware that spreads itself by injecting malicious code into other processes—really don’t exist to a significant degree these days, even on Windows, it’s definitely
not true that any platform is impervious to malware. Chromebooks are no exception.