


Trojan Horse: A Trojan is a kind of malware that is hidden, or disguised in software. You may think that you will never fall for a phishing attempt, but could you be as confident about your parents? Phishing: We’ve all received phishing emails and we all know the dangers, but as criminals get more sophisticated (and maybe even learn to spell) can we be sure we won’t fall for a phishing attempt to gain our data or log in details. This was enough of an issue for Apple to announce that they will warn users of spyware attacks like Pegasus (more on that below). One example of this would be the Pegasus spyware that was know to have Spyware: Our data is incredibly valuable to criminals and spyware is designed to obtain this information. ThiefQuest / EvilQuest – didn’t actually work very well and was quickly identified and stopped.Ĭryptocurrency miners: Criminals have attempted to use Macs to mine bitcoin and the like as in the case of LoudMiner (aka Bird Miner). Ransomware: Ransomware has been detected on Macs – although the most recent case So it seems that people are at least wising up to these dodgy programs. These apps tend to hound users, which is part of their downfall, as due to the bad reputations of some of these apps the number of Macs affected has fallen, according to Malwarebytes. Potentially Unwanted Programs (or PUPs): Famous examples include Advanced Mac Cleaner, Mac Adware Remover, and Mac Space Reviver. If you took Mac security techniques and applied them to the iOS ecosystem, with all those devices, all that value, it would get run over to a degree dramatically worse than is already happening on the Mac.”
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He said: “That’s despite the fact that Mac users inherently download less software and are subject to a way less economically motivated attacker base. The Mac is not meeting that bar today.”įederighi went on to explain that Mac users don’t download as much software as iOS users, so if iOS was as open to third-party downloads there would be a real problem for that platform. iOS has established a dramatically higher bar for customer protection. When the judge asked about the fact that Mac users can purchase and download software from various places on the Mac, rather than being limited to the Mac App Store, Federighi said: “Yeah, it’s certainly how we’ve done it on the Mac and it’s regularly exploited on the Mac. He revealed that 130 different cases of Mac malware have affected over 300,000 Macs since May 2020 and admitted that even members of his family had got malware on their Macs. But he didn’t hold much back with regards to the malware situation on the Mac. Federighi made the claim mainly to back up the need for an iOS App Store to protect iPhone and iPad users from malware on those devices.
