Mac malware evolves – time for Apple users to wake up

Mac users have once again been reminded not to be complacent about the malware threat, with the discovery that cybercriminals have enhanced an existing Trojan horse to disable the rudimentary anti-virus protection Apple has built into Mac OS X.

Despite the growth of Mac malware in the last 12 months, many users are still not protecting themselves from the threat. This is despite there now being industrial-strength free Mac anti-virus software available.

Our friends at F-Secure blogged today that they had noticed a new variant of the Flashback backdoor Trojan – which poses as an update to Adobe Flash – disables XProtect.

XProtect isn’t really comparable to a real anti-virus product on your Mac, but it does provide a limited amount of protection.

The fact that Mac malware is…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.