December 6th, 2007

F-Secure: More than 100-150 malware variants targeting Macs

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 3:42 pm

Categories: Apple, Security

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Malware, F-Secure Corp., Hacker, Desktops, Security, Hardware, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

The idea that Macs and the Mac OS would somehow remain invisible to hackers despite enjoying huge influx of new users was just too good to be true.  To be honest, the only people who really believed that hackers wouldn’t start targeting the Mac platform were Mac users looking for some false hope to cling to.  According to security experts at F-Secure, Fortress Mac is under attack.

“Over the past two years, we had found one or two pieces of malware targeting Macs,” said Patrik Runald, an F-Secure security researcher. “Since October, we’ve found 100-150 variants.”

And these hackers aren’t counting of flaws in the OS either:

Mr Runald said the jump in attacks against Apple appeared to be the work of a single gang of professional hackers. The group, known in security circles as the “Zlob gang”, makes programs that infect PCs by tricking users into thinking they are installing software needed to view copyrighted video files.

As with other attacks against Apple, the Zlob gang relies on tricking users to install its malicious software, rather than on exploiting any inherent software vulnerability.

The issue here is the type of people who are making the switch to the Mac OS, or more specifically, the kinds of people who the hackers believe are switching to Macs.  Given the fact that we’re seeing old Windows trick such as fake codecs now being used on Mac users, the hackers obviously see the “Windows to Mac OS switchers” as the gullible, click on anything type of user who made the switch to Mac because they’d trashed their old systems.  They trashed their Windows machines, now the hackers are giving them the opportunity to do the same to their Mac systems.

PEBKAC.

Thoughts?