Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

First Scareware For the Mac

Posted by kdawson on from the rogue-cleaning-tool dept.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property sends us news from F-Secure of what they claim is the first rogue cleaning tool for the Mac. MacSweeper is a Mac version of Cleanator, hosted from a colo somewhere in the Ukraine. The article points out that the company's About page is lifted verbatim from Symantec's site. With the Mac's market share closing in on double digits, perhaps it's not surprising to see the platform targeted with crapware as PCs have been for years. The F-Secure author adds as a footnote that a journalist said to him something you don't hear every day: "I visited the macsweeper.com website. I know I probably shouldn't have but I used a Windows PC so I knew I wouldn't get infected."

6 of 301 comments (clear)

  1. Oh no! by luftrofl · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Don't show this to everyone claiming that macs don't get viruses!

    1. Re:Oh no! by Arcady13 · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      There are no hyphens in Mac OS X or in Mac OS 9. Would you talk about Windows-95 or Windows-Vista?

  2. funny thought... by eNygma-x · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    All my Mac using friends are going to hate this.... Oh wait my friends don't use Macs! =)

    --
    As in most religions, it's the followers that turn people off to the religion. And Mac users are the worst.
  3. the shit hits the fan! by ILuvRamen · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    You know how they say everyone who isn't good with computers should use a mac cuz it's a hand holding type of OS that simplifies everything for the user and doesn't let you into the really technical stuff without a lot of digging. So yeah, simple folk use the macs lol. You could train a monkey to run a mac. And from repairing comps in home for 4 year lemme just tell you that that's the kind of people who download and install fake scanners. The last one I did was from someone who saw a popup that said they have malware so they did the scan and OMG it installed some adware! OH NOZ! They never saw it coming *rolls eyes* yeah, so mac people are either hippies, self important starbucks customers, media ediors, or mac software programmers and 3/4 of them are dumb enough to install this new "scanner"

    --
    Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
  4. Re:Yeah and moon is made from.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    How about you come back when you have proof for writing what works like English, illiterate Mac fanboi. You has add nothing to discussion.

  5. Re:Isn't any "cleaning tool" rogue on a mac? by Jeremi · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    How could anybody trust a cleaner for a platform that doesn't, as yet, need cleaning?


    It's the people who aren't sophisticated enough to tell the difference between suggestions given by an untrusted third party app from the Ukraine, and suggestions given by the operating system itself.


    In other words, Mac users ;^) [ducks and runs]

    --


    I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.