adam roberts

People have become increasingly reliant on their mobile devices in recent years. Smartphones and tablets have revolutionized daily life. Unfortunately, such rapid growth has also attracted criminals, bringing Android up to par with Windows in terms of infection rates. Android threat landscape A rapidly increasing group of threats on Android devices are so-called screen lockers, a form of ransomware that attempts to hold your device hostage by locking the screen with a ransom message and making it unusable. Android ransomware rose by nearly 140% globally from Q1 to Q2 of this year alone. Trojan malware is also on the rise, increasing by 10% in that same timeframe, with many of the threats in this category being banking Trojans. Such malware poses a significant risk, allowing attackers to potentially clean out an unfortunate victim’s bank account. Potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) are also a growing threat, accounting for nearly half of all Android threat detections in the first ha..

Mac users have been told for years: Macs don’t get viruses. Even Apple said so, in their famous Get a Mac ads that aired a decade ago. Wow, that’s so cool! It’s good to know we’re all safe. Now, on a different topic, can you tell me why Safari is going to a Russian search engine instead of Google? And I keep getting pop-ups telling me to “clean your Mac from junk!” Mac threat landscape Unfortunately, this old “wisdom” has never been true. There has almost always been malware for the Mac. The first widespread virus was the Elk Cloner virus, which actually infected the Apple II, prior to any PC malware. Some of the earliest malware affected the first Macs in the mid-1980s. The switch to a completely new architecture in Mac OS X, in 2001, killed all the old “Classic” Mac malware, but it didn’t take long for more to start appearing, starting with the MW2004 trojan a few years later. The only reason the myth that Macs can’t get infected with malware has persisted is that, until recently, ..