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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.
I hate adware bunding.
Bounding? Binding? Bonding? Banding? Bunging? Funding? (let me know if i'm missing anything) For fuck's sake, it's not a high crime to edit typos in article summaries or the fucking title.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
I know I'm not the only one that gets pissed off by sites that decide to autoplay a video when you visit a page. Do not link to fortune.com or any other site with autoplaying videos!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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.