September 29, 2014
The evolution of OS X malware.
Is there any (Mac) OS X-specific malware around?
Oh yes. But for some odd reason I haven’t said anything interesting on this topic for quite a while…
The last time was two and a half years ago. Yes, that’s how long it’s been since the global Flashback worm outbreak that infected 700 thousand Macs worldwide. The security industry made quite a bit of noise about it (and quickly disabled the Flashback botnet), but since then – mostly silence… It might seem to some that ever since there’s been a complete lull on the Mac-malware front and not one bit of iMalware has disturbed Apple Bay’s calm waters…
But they’d be wrong…
Sure, if you compare the threat levels of picking up some malware on different platforms, at the top of the table, by a long way, as ever, is the most widely used platform – Microsoft Windows. Quite a way behind it is Android – a relatively new kid on the block. Yep, over the past three years the cyber-vermin has been seriously bombarding the poor little green robot with exponentially increasing levels of malicious activity. Meanwhile, in the world of iPhones and iPads, except for very rare cyber-espionage attacks, there have been hardly any successful attacks thereon (despite using various exotic methods). It’s a similar story with Macs too – things are relatively peaceful compared to other platforms; but of late there have been… stirrings – about which I’ll be talking in this post.
Briefly, a few numbers – kinda like an executive summary:
- The numbers of new for-Mac malware instances detected in the last few years are already in the thousands;
- In the first eight months of 2014, 25 different ‘families’ of Mac malware were detected;
- The likelihood of an unprotected Mac becoming infected by some Mac-specific-unpleasantness has increased to about three percent.
In 2013 alone @kaspersky detected ~1700 malware samples for OS XTweet
Read on: let’s dig deeper and look at the situation from a malware expert PoV…
