{"id":6583,"date":"2012-10-16T09:53:19","date_gmt":"2012-10-16T16:53:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intego.com\/mac-security-blog\/?p=6583"},"modified":"2024-07-29T12:07:10","modified_gmt":"2024-07-29T19:07:10","slug":"politically-motivated-malware-attacks-increasing-regardless-of-operating-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intego.com\/mac-security-blog\/politically-motivated-malware-attacks-increasing-regardless-of-operating-system\/","title":{"rendered":"Politically Motivated Malware Attacks Increasing Regardless of Operating System"},"content":{"rendered":"

Those of us in the anti-malware industry spend a lot of time talking about financially motivated malware. For those of you reading this, that is what most of you are most likely to be affected by, as everyone has something of value to cybercriminals on their machine, even if it’s just using the processing power of the machine to send spam. However, there are groups of people that have much more to worry about \u2013 they’re also in the malware cross-hairs for political reasons. In these cases, it doesn’t matter what sort of machine you use. Malware authors will find a way to get to you, regardless of how rare it is for the general population to be affected on that OS, unless you take the threat seriously.<\/p>\n

A recent article that quoted Seth Hardy of The Citizen Lab<\/a>\u00a0brought up an interesting point about threats that have been discovered for Macs over the past few months: There has been an increasing number of politically-motivated targeted attacks. Imuler<\/a>, Tibet<\/a> and Sabpab<\/a> targeted Tibetan activists, and Crisis<\/a> targeted Moroccan journalists. There is evidence that a lot of people who are in positions to be targeted have moved away from Windows, thinking Macs were malware-proof. Clearly, that\u2019s not the case, and spyware continues to plague them.<\/p>\n

\"tibetan<\/a><\/p>\n

Activists are increasingly becoming susceptible to malware attacks. <\/em><\/p>\n

Malware authors have proven on every platform that if there is a \u201cneed\u201d for malware (especially spyware), it can and will be created. Trojans<\/a> and commercial spyware tools have even been discovered for Blackberries, which were ostensibly created with security in mind, for business applications. These spyware applications were created for cell phones as soon as phones started having the ability to run code \u2013 the more powerful the device, the more powerful the spyware could be.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not significantly more difficult to develop malware for Macs, it\u2019s just that there is less money to be had on Macs due to the smaller market share. The malware landscape of OS X often resembles sort of a malware writer\u2019s value-add, creating an OS X version of an existing Windows malware kit. But if money is not the malware writer’s aim, if their end-goal is instead to spy on someone, a different OS version is not a significant hurdle.<\/p>\n

Regardless of what computing device you\u2019re using, you need to protect yourself. This can be of life or death importance if you\u2019re involved with politically sensitive groups like activism or journalism. The same advice we\u2019ve been giving for over a decade still applies:<\/p>\n