Ransomware has become the scourge of the web in recent months. Hospitals thrust back into the non-digital age, their files locked up until they paid hefty ransoms in Bitcoin.Schools suffering the same fate. A variant called Locky spreading like wildfire, nearly a million infections in a week. Another, Jigsaw, surfaced this week using imagery from theSaw film franchise to scare the pants off victims. Those are on top of more than 50 other families of ransomware, the most troublesome in recent memory being CryptoWall, robbing organizations and individuals of their funds. Government is even up in arms, the FBI issuing alerts and Congressmen calling for action.
But if you own an Apple AAPL +0.21% Mac, there’s much less chance of your PC being infected with ransomware than if you’re a Microsoft user. Only one fully-functional sample has ever been seen — KeRanger, which infected under 7,000 Apple machines. Not only are there only a handful of examples, two of which were developed as research projects rather than genuine cybercriminal tools, but one professional hacker has developed a tool he believes will successfully prevent any current forms of ransomware infecting Mac OS X. And he believes that as long as criminals aren’t able to hack his tool, future forms of ransomware should be killed before they even have a chance to make a mockery of Apple security. For the full article click here
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