Slashdot Mirror
McAfee: Big Spike In Mac OS Malware In 2016, Mostly From Adware Bundling (fortune.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Fortune:
Security firm McAfee released a report this week that showed a big jump in 2016 regarding malware hitting the Mac operating system. The McAfee report said there were 460,000 malware instances affecting the Mac OS in the fourth quarter of 2016, an over 700% jump from the previous year during the same quarter.
McAfee's new report confirms similar research by other cybersecurity firms in recent years that show an increased prevalence of malware affecting Apple computers. Essentially, as more people buy Apple computers, there are more possibilities for malware to infect the machines. But while an over 700% surge in malware may sound frightening, it should be noted that "the big increase in Mac OS malware was due to adware bundling," the report's authors wrote.
McAfee's new report confirms similar research by other cybersecurity firms in recent years that show an increased prevalence of malware affecting Apple computers. Essentially, as more people buy Apple computers, there are more possibilities for malware to infect the machines. But while an over 700% surge in malware may sound frightening, it should be noted that "the big increase in Mac OS malware was due to adware bundling," the report's authors wrote.
Every time I get a video ad on a page, I disable the styles and the javascript, find the video, get its URL and then add the domain to my hosts file.
The summary raises an interesting issue, that "the big increase in Mac OS malware was due to adware bundling." What adware is being bundled with what software or hardware? Obviously, Apple isn't going to be bundling adware with their MacOS devices, so who is doing this? What has been the effect of this malware? What's the most common malware, and what does it do? How is this affecting Mac users?
So I went to TFA for answers and found their section on Mac OS. Out of the 49 pages of the report, this is the entire text of the MacOS section: "Just as last quarter, the big increase in Mac OS malware was due to adware bundling. " There are also a couple of bar graphs.
I skimmed some of the rest of the report. There's 15 pages with some details about the Mirai botnet and how it works. In fact, it's the longest article in the thing. If I were going to try to get someone to read this report, and I wanted to give, say, a headline and summary talking about its contents, I might choose to talk about the Mirai article, rather than a throw-away gloss on page 39 with two bar graphs that exist without context in something that looks like an appendix.
Should McAfee (the company) change its name? I know that I, for one, have to fight the urge to summarily dismiss an article when I see it starting with a quote from McAfee. For me, that name has a connotation that is not a good one...