Not everyone knows that virus-free Mac OS has been a delusion for as long as 10 years now. The first known Mac shell script worm called Renepo having been written back in 2004, the security industry has seen dozens of increasingly sophisticated samples of spyware, backdoors, rogue antiviruses and even ransomware for said operating system ever since.
Some of the most notorious occurrences were the Jahlav DNS changer, MacSweep and MacDefender scareware programs, the so-called FBI MoneyPak screen locker and the massive Flashback virus outbreak affecting over 600,000 users. As it recently turned out, though, Mac-specific malicious code is no longer the sole safety concern for the Apple community as there have emerged programs capable of compromising Mac OS X and Windows alike.
The weak link most heavily exploited in these schemes is the web browsing facet of computer use. The company called Genieo , for instance, has been accused of large-scale unethical online marketing and spreading adware along with delivering the personalized browser homepage feature. Drive-by products distributed through the Genieo network have called forth negative user feedback due to their intrusiveness, associated privacy concerns and hurdles removing them from the browsers. Speaking of such infections as Trovi , Conduit Search and Rvzr-a.akamaihd.net, which are some of the other widespread adware entities in the wild, they were originally designed to contaminate Windows but eventually stepped into the Mac niche as well.
The user interaction activity deployed by cross-platform adware samples follows basically the same patterns for different operating systems: these apps modify browsing preferences in order to redistribute web traffic to third-party resources and display ads to their victims. Manual removal of these threats is mostly inefficient because of code obfuscation and self-restore capacity.
The bottom line is obvious: neither Windows nor Mac users are immune to the same malware these days. The merging of digital threats platform-wise reflects the continuously refining cybercrime infrastructure and techniques applied. That being said, a trusted antivirus solution is most certainly a must-have thing regardless of the OS used.
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