By Eduard Kovacs on March 12, 2021 An increasing number of Mac malware developers have started creating variants that are specifically designed to run on devices powered by Apple’s M1 chip. Apple unveiled its M1 system-on-chip in November 2020 and the first malware created specifically for systems with the arm64 CPU architecture used by the M1 was apparently created in December. This was a variant of Pirrit, a piece of adware that has been around for several years. A few days after the existence of this Pirrit variant came to light, managed detection and response firm Red Canary reported identifying a mysterious piece of Mac malware that had infected tens of thousands of devices around the world. This malware, named Silver Sparrow, also had a variant specifically designed for M1 systems.