Sophos unveils top 20 Mac malware list
Software security firm Sophos has released a list of the 20 most commonly detected types of malware for Mac users. Topping the list is Mal/ASFDldr-A, malware that comes in the form of malicious media files.
The Mal/ASFDldr-A malware uses the scripting capabilities of Microsoft Media Play to force the web browser to visit an infected site instead of playing the media file.
“Normally the infected media files are blank (no music, no video) but they are distributed posing as music from Lady Gaga, ABBA, Madonna, etc. They are several megabytes in size due to null padding. So there's definitely nothing to lose and everything to gain by erasing them”, wrote Graham Cluley on Sophos’s NakedSecurity blog. The statistics on the Mac malware comes from Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition, which the company launched on Nov. 2. The company collected 50 000 malware reports from Mac users during Nov. 2–16, 2010.
