The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Scareware scammers target Mac users

Neil Woolford

Typical of capitalist corporations to ignore Linux! 

Coat

First the indignity of not being able to use BBC iPlayer or whatever it is on our Linux boxes and now the insult of not receiving properly crafted scareware ads.

I look forward to earnest forum postings, aimed at complete newbies, about simply needing to "Open a terminal, use vim to edit /etc/apt/sources to include www.dodgy.malware.cn and then just apt-get update and apt-get upgrade....."

An ominous cow herd

"In a way the creation of the malware is a complement, of sorts, to the Mac" 

And may I complement the author on that assumption....

Anonymous Coward

No way 

Jobs Halo

Its a complete lie. Macs are super special awesome and never have problems ever.

Paul George

@No Way 

Stop

Get back under the bridge! :-)

A mac user since the 512K

Anonymous Coward

Social Engineering 

Quote: ""[This] doesn't mean that Mac is becoming less secure in and of itself. But it does mean that Mac users will have to watch out for social engineering tricks just like Windows users have had to do for years," F-secure reports."

Um, Mac users have had to do and should have been doing that anyway, so what is new about this? Nothing.

Morely Dotes

Re: Social Engineering 

Coat

"[This] doesn't mean that Mac is becoming less secure in and of itself. But it does mean that Mac users will have to watch out for social engineering tricks just like Windows users have had to do for years," F-secure reports."

But they've been doing that. That's how they decided to get a Mac in the first place - they resisted the social engineering tricks foisted on the sheeple by Microsoft.

(I'm a Linux fanboi, persoanlly, but Macs are at least not Windows. The enemy of my enemy is ... Well, a less threatening enemy.)

Aubry Thonon

"In a way the creation of the malware is a complement, of sorts, to the Mac" 

I didn't realise that Macs needed malware to be considered complete...

Anonymous Coward

No, Really? 

Unhappy

One of the first things I did when I got my MacBook was scope out the types of security available for Macs. I figured sooner or later since Vista is such a piece of shite more people were going to go "to the Dark Side" (well, as M$ sees it), and malware attacks were going to rise...some of us aren't idiots.

Looks like the free ride is over.

penno

this could be interesting 

i wonder how gullible the mac fanbois will be towards this stuff. If they have a tendency to believe their macbooks are impervious, they might tend to believe the crap popping up on their screens. I wonder...

ian

not a compliment 

Unhappy

I think a dictionary may be "a complement, of sorts", to the author