Mac
has always been a very secure and virus-free operating system. But in
the past, attackers and hackers have tried to infect Mac and stole
user's personal and confidential information. Recently,
Mac got hit by an attack, a variant of 'LuckyCat' virus, that
took advantage of Microsoft Office Word to hack into the user's
system and steals away with the important information and data stored
on the hard drive. This was not the first time Mac was targeted by a
backdoor virus. They had been targeted by many viruses and malwares
in past too and some of them are listed below.
List of
virus and malwares that attacked Mac OS X:
Patient zero:
In
Mac, file extensions are not visible on thumbnails so it will be easy
for a virus to masquerade easily by depicting as
some other file type. The patient-zero virus turned up in 2004 using
this technique.
RSPlug.A:
This virus
becomes active in 2007 and it is used basically to get user login
information of different sites like paypal and ebay.com. This virus
pretends to be a quicktime codec and when user clicks to install it,
a DNS server gets installed which takes them to a fake site of ebay
and paypal.
MacGuard:
It was a
phishing attack that came into action in 2008 which tells Mac users
that their Mac is corrupted and you need to install 'MacGuard' to
protect Mac. But in reality this was a attack to steal users credit
card details.
Flashback virus:
Flashback
virus affects Mac in september, 2011. This virus pretends to be an
installer of the Adobe flash player and affected Mac when users
installed it thinking as adobe flash player. When the user started
this infected application, virus started executing the code and sent
the user personal information to remote server. You can get more info
about this on
http://data-recovery-tool.blogspot.in/2012/07/how-flashback-virus-affected-mac.html.
But still Mac is
far safer than Windows which gets easily vulnerable to viruses and
malwares but it's not fully protected and safe. It is advisable to
install a good antivirus on your Mac.