Apple has decided to acknowledge the Mac Defender malware variants and says it will help fight the FakeAV software through an update.
Recently, Mac users started reporting problems with several fake security products. The Mac Defender family of malware products works the same as countless FakeAV/scareware products that target Windows users. It will alert the user of the system to fake ... [ read the full article ]
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I already sent this article to a lot of people I know who own macs and act like what I've been telling them since forever isn't true. Mac is just as vulnerable as any other system once their market share goes up enough to attract some attention. Its only common sense but a lot of mac users are pretty dumb. (no offence to the ones who actually know the reality of things)
It isn't (entirely) the fault of the users. A lot of mac users are very smart people who make enough money at their highly skilled jobs to spend whatever it costs for a good computer...[sarcasm]and naturally, the most expensive one must be the best, right?[/sarcasm]. Anyway, these people are bombarded with advertising that tells them that macs are impervious to attack, fast, reliable, etc...and all Microsoft can really say about windows 7 is, "It is a lot better than Vista".
Personally, I would rather spend money on good parts than on a namebrand, and I don't want MacOS...but if I did, I could install it on a PC anyhow...I need both Windows and Linux because I use a ton of strange software that is written by random hackers...but how many doctors and lawyers think in such terms?
In the end, no platform is truly safe...that is what updates are for.
I have been smacked about the head and shoulders a couple of times myself by Mac users myself. Not that the Mac user was infected mind you, but that a file the Mac user was hosting had a file that contained a virus he/she was passing on to other recipients.
I ended up having to get into a pissing match with them over a PC/Mac war for no good reason other than to merely 'alert' them of what I had found. Now that the hardware market is no longer 'that' proprietary anymore, just about anyone is vulnerable to viral attacks.
I suppose some folks are just going to have to take some getting used to the growing pains of it.
While Apple's leisurely "We're too cool to rush, and we'll do it better than you when we feel like it." Attitude normally suits them pretty well, I'm not sure that it is going to fly with malware on the line. Malware responses verging on a month are somewhere between "Microsoft" and "Adobe"...
Apple's leisurely attitude does not work anyway...they have terrible hardware and their OS's are not terribly impressive; OSX is just a crippled version of Linux, and iOS is more restrictive than a prison camp (unless you jailbreak).
They sell a namebrand to people who don't know any better, and they charge high-end I7 money for low-end I5s...so people assume that there must be something good in there to justify the insane price.
It also doesn't help when places like BestBuy train employees to tell people that Macs are, "indestructible". Just for a laugh, I asked the PC guy what was the most, "bullet-proof" laptop they had; I told him it was for my dad who is a trucker who keeps dropping laptops from his truck cab. What did the salesman point me towards? A $500 entry-level laptop, but with an apple sticker and a $1500 pricetag...and the display model (which was clamped in place) had a broken hinge and a missing key! Yeah...real bullet-proof! I told him that he just lost a sale...I actually found a Toshiba that would have been perfect, but screw BestBuy...if they train their people to lie like that, then they are not getting my money.
