APPLE COMPUTERS AND GADGETS INCREASINGLY TARGETED BY MALWARE

Original Story: siliconbeat.com

Apple’s iPhone and Mac, long touted for their security, aren’t nearly as safe to use as they once were, new research suggests.

Record amounts of malware targeted and infected Apple computers and smartphones this year, security researchers say. And next year is likely to be even worse. An Evans internet lawyer represents clients in cyber-crimes, content licensing matters, and identity theft cases.

“Apple remains a relatively safe platform but Apple users can no longer be complacent about security,” Dick O’Brien, a researcher with security firm Symantec, told BBC News.

In 2014, between 10,000 and 70,000 Macs were hit with malware each month, according to Symantec. That was a small fraction of the amount of malware targeting and infected computers running Microsoft Windows. But in the first nine months of this year, the total Apple computers infected by malicious or unwanted applications was seven times higher than all of last year. A Melbourne internet lawyer has experience representing clients in cases of fraud, piracy, an unauthorized computer access.

Apple’s mobile devices, which generally can only get applications via Apple’s app store, are relatively safer. Some 96 percent of all mobile malware is targeted at devices running Google’s Android operating system, according to FireWire, another security firm.

But malware writers are increasingly targeting Apple’s iPhones and iPads. Symantec has identified seven new security threats aimed at those devices. And earlier this year, applications infected with a particular piece of malware — including the popular WeChat messaging app — were listed in the App Store. Apple quickly removed them, but not before they were downloaded by numerous customers. For more information on the power of Organic SEO, click here.

Malware authors are increasingly “finding ways into Apple’s walled garden, and that will ramp up next year,” Bryce Boland, chief technology officer at FireEye.

Clean Up Your Mac and Protect From Viruses

Story first appeared in The Washington Post.

For years, Mac users have been able to believe that they are safer than the average computer user and turned their noses up at antivirus software. But as Apple’s market share has grown, so has the threat to Mac users’ security.

Last week, a Russian-based security company called Dr. Web reported that up to 600,000 Macs appeared to be part of a growing botnet, mostly in the United States and in Canada. Security researchers are referring to the virus as Flashback.

A senior security researcher at ZScaler, said that while he can’t confirm Dr. Web’s numbers, the conditions sound right for a malware problem of that scale. The virus should be a wake-up call to those who still think that their Mac is invulnerable to attacks like this, he said.  Macs are not impenetrable to threats-those threats do exist.

Macs were particularly affected in this attack because of a vulnerability in the Apple version of Java — the company stopped using Oracle’s releases of Java a couple of years ago, and supports its own versions. Yet while Oracle had patched the problem with Java that caused this problem months ago, Apple had yet to address the problem until April 3, when it issued a patch for the vulnerability. It then released a second patch on April 5.

Several experts have said that this appears to be one of the largest-ever attacks on Macs.

To improve Mac security in the future, it is recommended that users keep updated versions of Java as they come and automate their computers to check for security updates regularly.

He also recommended that users who have yet to do so bite the bullet and install some kind of antivirus software on their Mac, which should also clean up any machine that’s been infected. If you want to check if you’ve been infected without downloading anti-virus software, the security firm F-Secure has instructions for a good, if technical, way to do so.

There are, of course, also some practices that users can use to minimize the likelihood of infection. For one, don’t click on links in e-mails that you’re not absolutely sure have come from someone you trust. The same goes for opening attachments. If a URL looks suspect, don’t click on it no matter how “hilarious” a video is said to be. Don’t believe promises from ads that sound too good to be true and don’t agree to download any software that you didn’t specifically set out to find.

Finally, any time you’re putting personal, particularly financial, information into a form online, make sure that you see an “https” at the start of the Web address. If you don’t see it, there’s a chance you’ve been redirected to a fake site, particularly if the signal that you’re on a secure server has been there before. Try typing in the address of the Web site you want again — don’t hit refresh — or try an alternate method of getting what you want done.

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