"It started with one call a day two weeks ago, now it's every other call. Ed Bott at ZDNet reports that an AppleCare support rep told him call volume on the support line was four to five times higher than normal and most of the calls were about the malware.
#Mac virus software cnet mac#
While it's definitely not an epidemic, it does seem to be hitting the radar more than other Mac malware has in the past. The malicious sites are taken down and changed from day to day so blocking them is difficult. For instance, one of the sites was in the top five spots this week for searches on "DSK," or Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French official on the International Monetary Fund who was arrested on sexual assault charges last weekend, according to Intego spokesman Peter James. They use an image related to a popular news topic as bait to lure people to the site, according to Mac antivirus firm Intego, which warned about MacDefender earlier this month. The malicious sites are created solely to distribute malware and they are search engine optimized so they will appear high up in search results. People get infected with the rogue antivirus programs when they happen to stumble upon Web sites hosting the malware. MacDefender, also known as Mac Security and Mac Protector, is a fake antivirus program that is designed to scare people into thinking that their computers are infected with malware and that they have to pay with a credit card to clean the machine up. This FAQ sorts through the facts to help determine how serious the issue really is. But this is the first time this type of malware has been written to target the much smaller Mac market.
#Mac virus software cnet windows#
So-called rogue antivirus has been hitting Windows machines for years. Macintosh users are being targeted with malware that poses as an antivirus warning and tries to trick people into paying for software they don't need. MacDefender pretends to be anti-malware software that detects infections on your computer.
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