McAfee: Big Spike In Mac OS Malware In 2016, Mostly From Adware Bundling (fortune.com) 64
An anonymous reader quotes Fortune:
Security firm McAfee released a report this week that showed a big jump in 2016 regarding malware hitting the Mac operating system. The McAfee report said there were 460,000 malware instances affecting the Mac OS in the fourth quarter of 2016, an over 700% jump from the previous year during the same quarter.
McAfee's new report confirms similar research by other cybersecurity firms in recent years that show an increased prevalence of malware affecting Apple computers. Essentially, as more people buy Apple computers, there are more possibilities for malware to infect the machines. But while an over 700% surge in malware may sound frightening, it should be noted that "the big increase in Mac OS malware was due to adware bundling," the report's authors wrote.
McAfee's new report confirms similar research by other cybersecurity firms in recent years that show an increased prevalence of malware affecting Apple computers. Essentially, as more people buy Apple computers, there are more possibilities for malware to infect the machines. But while an over 700% surge in malware may sound frightening, it should be noted that "the big increase in Mac OS malware was due to adware bundling," the report's authors wrote.
Oh No! (Score:4, Funny)
I hate adware bunding.
Bunding (Score:4, Insightful)
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"Bundling", you nitwit.
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unix (Score:1, Troll)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The official Unix brand is granted to whoever pays the fee, actual compliance with the specs doesn't matter -- there's a huge leeway in testing so even stuff as insane as AIX can pass.
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MacOS has very little malware or viruses because only the rubes buy anti-virus software.
The market for malware is driven by a large network of freelancers who find viruses and malware and give the profiles to the anti-virus companies. And how best to get it first? Make the damn virus.
I have no real proof of this, but it can't really be disproved either. And the market incentive is strong to NOT run out of virus and malware threats.
By bundling virus solutions with their OS, Microsoft put a good dent in virus
NO FORTUNE.COM LINKS! (Score:5, Insightful)
I know I'm not the only one that gets pissed off by sites that decide to autoplay a video when you visit a page. Do not link to fortune.com or any other site with autoplaying videos!
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Save your breath. There's a solution [browser.org] for everything
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Everything?
Cool. I feel better already.
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Every time I get a video ad on a page, I disable the styles and the javascript, find the video, get its URL and then add the domain to my hosts file.
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Sigh. I wished they didn't constantly change the URLs. If they're plucky and use cloudflare or an AWS source, you're screwed.
Oh... wait...
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I run Pale Moon browser. In about:config,change 2 settings...
media.autoplay.allowscripted; false
media.autoplay.enabled; false
Voila; no more autoplay. The only downside is that some Youtube videos have to be clicked 2 or 3 times to get them to play.
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Unfortunately it breaks Twitch entirely. You can't start a video without autoplay enabled.
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At least sound in such videos is no longer a concern [mozilla.org] on Linux.
Article has (almost) nothing to do with MacOS (Score:5, Informative)
The summary raises an interesting issue, that "the big increase in Mac OS malware was due to adware bundling." What adware is being bundled with what software or hardware? Obviously, Apple isn't going to be bundling adware with their MacOS devices, so who is doing this? What has been the effect of this malware? What's the most common malware, and what does it do? How is this affecting Mac users?
So I went to TFA for answers and found their section on Mac OS. Out of the 49 pages of the report, this is the entire text of the MacOS section: "Just as last quarter, the big increase in Mac OS malware was due to adware bundling. " There are also a couple of bar graphs.
I skimmed some of the rest of the report. There's 15 pages with some details about the Mirai botnet and how it works. In fact, it's the longest article in the thing. If I were going to try to get someone to read this report, and I wanted to give, say, a headline and summary talking about its contents, I might choose to talk about the Mirai article, rather than a throw-away gloss on page 39 with two bar graphs that exist without context in something that looks like an appendix.
Re:Article has (almost) nothing to do with MacOS (Score:5, Funny)
Aww, now you've gone and ruined it for everybody. You read TFA.
Re:Article has (almost) nothing to do with MacOS (Score:5, Insightful)
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My girlfriend got caught by some nasty OS X malware very recently from an ad network. It disguised itself as Flash Player and instead was CleanMyMac.
It had a valid developer certificate from Apple and she's aware enough to know that Flash Player needs updating. She didn't expect something bordering on a virus to change a load of settings and demand money for made-up problems.
For as long as I can remember Macs had avoided this kind of nastiness and there was a great community of great apps without spyware/ma
Name change warranted? (Score:4, Informative)
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Calling themselves (correctly) Intel Security Group would probably alleviate this.
But it isn't true. McAfee was purchased on a bidding of the software group exec to try and make up for her lack of revenue. Everyone else in the company went "Wut?!". Now she's gone, McAfee no longer have a protector and it is going away along with her. "Intel Security" is composed of a number of interlinked groups in Intel that cover various security domains. They have almost nothing to do with McAfee.
FWIW, McAfee do make good software security products, but anti-virus ain't one of them. One of the reasons
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"They have almost nothing to do with McAfee."
McAfee is owned by the Intel Security Group subsidiary company.
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Should McAfee (the company) change its name?
Perhaps they could rename to "You'd never install us voluntarily, Inc"?
I disable McAfee "add-on" install with Flash updates all the time. And yet just a couple of months ago I had to uninstall it anyway (something else snuck it in without asking)
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Hahaha, disregard that, I suck cocks
APK
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Why do psychic's need maps...?
To show that they can solve graph isomorphisms in sub-poly time using their psychic powers.
In other words, buy a Windows PC... (Score:4)
And get our McAfee bundled malware/adware preinstalled on your PC before you even connect it to the Internet!
Come on guys, it's a huge timesaver! We're so advanced that we'll start hitting you up with ads for the full paid version of our software before you've even finished updating your drivers.
No respect for McAfee. (Score:1)
Literally, just yesterday I removed a TROJAN.DNSChanger and a metric ton of PUPS/PUMS from a clients computer all the while McAfee was saying all was fine.
I booted into safemode, checked startup programs, and I could see a fake antivirus with little to no effort!.
Malwarebytes found and removed all of this, after which McAfee all of a sudden starts working and begins to run an update which appeared to not have run for a few months.
I get this all_the_time with Trend, McAfee and Nortons that it beggars belief.