Beyond

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“There’s a new trend out there designed to scam computer users: web sites that sell bogus software. Not only does the software not do what it claims to do, but the companies that sell this “software” get a hold of your credit card and can do even more damage to your bank account."

Sunbelt Software , who have exposed a lot of crapware (Rogue software) aimed at the Windows platform, have now at last found crapware aimed at the Mac OSX platform. They know it’s crapware because it’s brought to you by none other than the same people who gave Windows users scareware like Antivirus XP 2008 and XP Antivirus.

There aren’t many malware components aimed at OSX; but the number has seemingly increased by at least 1 recently. However they only found the site itself for the new MacGuard malware program, but were unable to get hold of any program. The site itself appears to have now also been disabled; possibly by Apple themselves?

Macs have appeared relatively untouched by threats for a long time; but now it seems that malicious software targeted at OSX is about to awake Mac users from their sleep of complacency. Previously in March of this year, 2008, a Mac security site, Macvirus.org, with a forum full of links to malware which targets Apple computers; the RSPlug-Gen trojan in particular, as well as the Zlobar-Fam trojan for distribution to PCs running Windows. They were posing as fake codecs supposedly needed to view a non-existent pornographic film of Britney Spears.

There are a number of ways of looking at this: Either you could say every virus targeted at a Mac is one less virus targeted at Windows (Aren’t there enough already?), or you could say that those people who use alternative operating systems to Windows aren’t as safe as they might imagine; and their complacency could be their downfall at the end of the day.

What do you think? Do non-Windows users need to bother with anti-malware programs?