Mac Malware from Fake Flash Installer

[paulr]

While splitting hairs might be fun, the point remains that there are programs designed to do harm in some way (be it stealing your personal info or messing with your files) affecting Macs these days and my point was only that they are not immune from trojans or viruses or whatever you want to call them due to the increased potential of Macs as targets these days.

Not splitting hairs. The distinction is major. There has ALWAYS been malware that targetted macs. Back in the OS9 days it was much bigger deal because we had genuine viruses, which could infect a machine and self-replicate without any any participation from the user. These were pretty minor compared with windows viruses, but they were bad enough to temporarily cripple a couple of studios I worked in.

Since OSX, that concern has been over. No one has been able to make such an attack work in real life. There have been a number of trojans and other "social engineering" exploits, this most recent being (maybe) the most sucessful. But they are all easy to guard against. Simply following normal practices on a mac, and not giving up your admin password for a request you don't understand, will protect you.

This situation won't change. It's not possible to make an OS structually resistant to social engineering attacks in the way that OSX is structually resistant to viruses.

[Insi1ght]

A lot of mac adware get installed bundled with other soft, it is important to uncheck all unnecessary check boxes when installing anything