Biggest Attack on Apple Computers Didn't Pay Off, Symantec Says
Symbolically, last month’s news of a hacking attack on more than 600,000 Mac computers sent a loud message: Apple products are now vulnerable to the same kind of mass infections that Microsoft Windows computers are.
Financially, however, it was the equivalent of a bounced check — a big flop that likely netted the criminals nothing, according to new research from Symantec.
Liam O Murchu, who manages Symantec’s security response operations, said in an interview that the attack appears to have been short-circuited by its own high profile. It got so much attention that Symantec and other researchers were able to quickly shut down most of the command-and-control servers, cutting the criminals off from the infected machines. That meant the ad scam the criminals were trying to propagate never reached its full potential.
