Abundant Harvest of Mac Malicious Programs in 2011, Says Intego

According to Intego the security company, which released its latest report -"Year in Mac Security 2011," the year witnessed the highest level of activity from Mac malicious programs ever-since Mac OS X became available. Also, there were large executions of sophisticated assaults, which took end-users doing online searches for images on Google onto websites that thrust malware.

Evidently, a lot of the escalated activity sourced from the newly-surfaced Flashback program and the MacDefender malicious software, with the Flashback software pretending to be an installer of Adobe Flash. According to Intego, innumerable Mac-users felt the brunt of 2011's abundant harvest of malicious programs.

But, malicious software targeting Macs continues to be trivial as against Windows; however, users of Apple require being cautious of the increasing danger that socially-engineered assaults pose, the report states.

Meanwhile, the MacDefender malicious program disseminated through 'Search Engine Optimization Poisoning' that based on frequently-searched keywords for obtaining prominent ranks among the search engine returns, while end-users were deceived into taking down fake anti-virus software.

And by the time the hot season got over and MacDefender malware started vanishing as well as the general belief was that the situation of Mac malicious software would recede, another malware assault namely the Flashback Trojan assault inflicted Mac end-users.

Subsequently following the summer, twin Backdoor Trojans came to security researchers' notice. These were Olyx that was wholly new, and Flashback that masqueraded as an installer of Flash Player.

Nevertheless, as per Intego, there weren't any critical security flaws during 2011 which impacted Mac OS X albeit Apple did require releasing security patches to fix Safari, iTunes, QuickTime for Leopard and AirPort platforms, the Apple television and Time Capsule round the year.

Furthermore, Mac-owners potentially faced risks from people utilizing intermediate applications like Dropbox or Skype, as also from people utilizing software for reading Adobe's PDF. Additionally, phishing and hacking problems increased, while privacy issues occurred with the expansion of the Twitter and Facebook social networks, Intego observes.

Finally, Intego's report also mentions good news of 2011 i.e. the Estonian hacker group was arrested for unleashing the DNSChanger malware, which actually caused great annoyance to Mac-operators since years.

» SPAMfighter News - 2/2/2012