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Firm Behind MacDefender Malware Likely Busted in Russian Raid

MYmacROX

MYmacROX


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Companies in the business of writing and supporting malware such as MacDefender can rake in a lot of money in a short period of time. It’s an incredibly profitable business, feeding off the fear of individuals whom become victims to the scare tactics malware and phishing scams employ.
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I'm curious how much they actually made off of that particular scareware. If they ran the same scheme on a different OS, would they have raked in a lot more? It just makes you wonder if Mac users, as a whole, are as cautious and clever as we hope we are.
 
quin

quin


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Scams like this have been running on Windows systems for years. I remember encountered something very similar 7+ years ago on my PC while on the net. Clicked on a page and suddenly something pops up like a virus scanner, a bunch of red 'viruses' showed up on the 'scanner'. Makes you panic for about a second. But I can see how it may seems legit to someone not familiar.
 
MYmacROX

MYmacROX


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quin said:
Scams like this have been running on Windows systems for years. I remember encountered something very similar 7+ years ago on my PC while on the net. Clicked on a page and suddenly something pops up like a virus scanner, a bunch of red 'viruses' showed up on the 'scanner'. Makes you panic for about a second. But I can see how it may seems legit to someone not familiar.
Click to expand...

Exactly. Windows users are familiar with such "threats", so they may be more cautious. Mac users might be more complacent and therefore more likely to fall for such trickery. But Mac users are also more reliant on themselves to detect scams, so that's why I wonder if they/we were more or less successful than others OS users when it comes to detecting and avoiding scare ware.
 

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