Sophos Sees Macs OS Infected With Windows Sludge

[Peaches]

Sophos Sees Macs OS Infected With Windows Sludge

Posted by George Hulme

Anti-virus firm Sophos shows that while Macs may be under increasing malware threats, most of the sludge its anti-virus software found targeted Windows systems - Apple users aren't out of the woods.

Sophos has been giving away free anti-virus software for Mac users for a number of weeks now. The company claims to have more than 150,000 active users, and has sampled nearly 50,000 infection reports, from November 2 through November 16th.

Many of the malicious programs found in that analysis, not surprisingly, are Windows-specific attacks that Mac users are getting inadvertently. Perhaps by visiting infected Web sites and having the malware dropped into their browser caches, opening e-mail attachments, or by sharing and copying files by USB drives and other means.

Some of the malware are cross platform attacks, based on Java, while a few are Mac specific. From Sophos' blog http://nakedsecurity...-malware-found/ late last week.

We don't see as much Mac malware as Windows malware. Not by a long shot. But that doesn't mean that Mac users can afford to have their heads in the sand about about protecting their precious computers.

And, unfortunately, so long as Mac users don't properly defend themselves they will increasingly be perceived as a soft target by cybercriminals.

Read more here: http://www.informati...s_sees_mac.html