A report on malware attacks on various types of operating systems has found that Mac laptops have become susceptible to malware attacks over the course of time. In comparison to Windows, Linux, and other operating systems, Mac users were less susceptible to malware attacks. But this scenario has changed a lot as the number of people who use Mac have tripled from 2009 to 2017. About 10% of people use Mac operating systems and the major portion of people are businessmen who love to do creative works. This makes Mac a good option for malware developers to make a profit by causing damage.
The popular malware attack on Mac operating systems was seen in 2006. At that time, a Trojan horse namely, Leap or Oompa Loompa spread via iChat instant messaging service with the help of a hidden code in a file. After that, there have been several virus attacks on MacOS. One such was in 2016 when Safari, a DoS attack targeted Mac users with the help of a hidden link which appeared to be Apple tech support mail. It affected Macs using OS X 10.9 through to 10.12 and was later fixed with 10.12.1 update.
Most Windows operating systems get affected due to ransomware attacks, the number of such cases in Mac operating systems have increased on a large scale. One such was in 2016 when more than 7,000 Mac users were affected by the KeRanger with the help of an infected version of Transmission. As the infected image file contained a legitimate developer certificate so it didn’t issue security warnings. According to popular data recovery specialists, KeRager uses RSA and RSA public key cryptography to encrypt various types of files. Hence, a backup of all the important files should be there to get the lost data securely.
