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Message from Apple might not be what it seems

During the last few months, there has been less news about malware threats affecting Apple users, with a drop in pop-ups that claim a device has been infected and then demanding money to solve the problem.

Recently, however, the high-pressure scams have returned with renewed vigour. According to Paul Ducklin, Senior Technologist at Sophos, scammers are currently following Apple devices like hawks.

Traditionally, con artists who targeted Windows devices at least refrained from using the company’s name, not that it made their activities legal. A new generation of Mac scammers are going much further by claiming to be from Apple’s Support Centre. They steal Apple’s web pages and branding — occasionally even improving the design!

Sophos discovered these scams by opening an infected website that contained more than one scam, including three Apple related ones.
The first one is the aforementioned Support Centre con, which also features an auto-play, computer-generated text-to-voice message with some obvious spelling and grammatical errors.



The second scam involves a pop-up warning, saying: “YOUR SYSTEM IS INFECTED.” Upon clicking on the proceed button, it redirects you to an imitation virus scanner with a message that you should download a third-party Mac utility to solve all your problems.

The last one came in the form of a rather realistic Flash player update request, despite Adobe having skipped Patch Tuesday in October.

Traditionally, Macs have the reputation of being less vulnerable to cyber attacks than Windows PCs, but this might no longer be the case soon. Sophos recommends that all Apple users refrain from clicking on unknown links and stay away from doubtful commercial threat protection software that lures you in with a free scan.

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About the author

Chris

I've been a passionate evangelist for Apple and the Macintosh throughout my working life, my first love was a Quadra 605 working with a small creative agency in the south of Norfolk UK in the mid 1990's, I later progressed to other roles in other Macintosh dominated industries, first as a Senior graphic designer at a small printing company and then a production manager at Guardian Media Group. As the publishing and printing sector wained I moved into Internet Marketing and in 2006 co-founded blurtit.com which grew to become one the top 200 visited sites in the US (according to Quantcast), at its peak receiving over 15 million visits per month. For the last ten years I have worked as an Affiliate and Consultant to many different business and start ups, my key skill set being online marketing, on page monetisation, landing page optimisation and traffic generation, if you would like to hire me or discuss your current project please reach out to me here.

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