Apple Users Beware

During December's Security Training I was asked why "Apple products" don't get viruses. I noted that one of the primary reasons was simply that the market share of Apple vs. PC was very small in comparison and hackers usually choose to spend their programming time on the biggest audience possible. Hackers want the biggest bang for all of their hard and evil work. The below article which appeared recently at Spamnews.com covers the growing threat to Apple products in general. The morale of this story is use common sense and protect your information, regardless if you are a PC user or an Apple user.

According to McAfee the security vendor, which recently released a research study, Mac OS is in more danger of Apple Trojans and botnets because users tend to have low knowledge of how to keep new Apple tools secured, which leads them into the danger of identity theft. Current.com published this on January 10, 2011.

Moreover, there are other threats to Mac OS, according to the security company like botnets' rising operations, increasing hacktivism, and growing networks of online television that can cause businesses to lose secret data in case they're targeted.

In its security alert, Michael Sentonas, Chief Technology Officer for Asia Pacific states that while Mac users earlier were immune from hackers' assaults, they're currently being increasingly targeted through Apple products. Smartcompany published this on January 11, 2011.

Sentonas further states that it's being observed that both business and home users are increasingly using the Mac operating system and with the OS' growing market share, it's quite expected that distributors of malicious programs will begin considering focusing their attacks on this platform. The CTO cautions that Mac users can't just take for granted that they'll be safe from attacks, hence they must embrace anti-virus applications while maintaining it up-to-date.

Additionally he states that his company on average is spotting some 60,000 fresh malware items daily. And with this amount being huge, there's greater requirement of user awareness about this problem.

Moreover, McAfee further cautions that security risk is growing during 2011 since every minute about 3,000 shortened URLs are created. The company in its 2011 Threat Predictions Report forecasts that there'll be more danger with URL-condensing utilities on social-networking websites. Also it forecasts that hackers on social-networking websites will increasingly concentrate on geo-location utilities like Gowalla, Foursquare as well as Facebook Places, which trace users' whereabouts and also publish them.

Eventually, McAfee notes that still other threats such as viruses from personal contacts, or malware camouflaged as genuine files and e-mails will all become more advanced thereby effectively deceive unsuspecting users during 2011. Besides, botnets will keep on using unlimited stolen bandwidth along with computing power across the world, the company adds.