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by coldtea
4130 days ago
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>Now that Mac OS X has hit about 7% of internet users, it's profitable enough for adware/malware folks to target. I keep hearing this stats, and it's not true that a platform is hit based on how much share it has. Share does affect the volume of the available malware, but not whether it exists or not. And for 10+ years on Mac it was unexisting -- all such cases touted by the media were proven to be trojan horses, not viruses and such. Contrast with Mac OS classic that was plagued by lots of viruses, despite having 2% market share at best at the time. Or even platforms like the Amiga and Atari -- viruses were prevalent. |
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Most of the issues today are about money or reputation.
Adware and spyware makes money for the publisher, so they target areas where they can do that. It's actually legal and semi-legitimate. It's an annoyance for the end user, of course. A freeware publisher doesn't make any money from their app but they can make money from bundling an ad replacer, search engine replacer, browser extension, etc with their free software. So, they do.
Malware follows the same trail. You can distribute cracked software online over torrents like Photoshop and the like but sneak your remote-controllable malware into it. Then you get more installs you can use to direct a DDoS bot attack or to watch for and steal financial details from the local machine. Maybe look for the default install of a cryptocurrency client and grab the local wallet, for instance. Note that this is more difficult on both modern Windows and modern Mac than it was back in the days of Mac classic.