Hey Gruber, You Might Want to Reconsider Crying Wolf

The other day John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame and unofficial spokesman for Apple wrote a post full of quotes from other dated posts where the writers were brazen enough to suggest that Mac’s long safe harbor against malware, trojans, and viruses would come to an end one day.

I’ve written much the same thing on more than one occasion but it is always nice when you have some pro’s to back you up as Sophos is today.

In a post by Chester Wisniewski on the Sophos blog he warns that they have come across a JavaScript fake scanner meant to convince Mac users that their computers are infected.

This step is extra important on OS X as users will have to install the malware and enter in their administrative credentials for the privilege of infected themselves.

Even worse, the attackers are poisoning search terms and images related to Mother’s Day. Simply searching Google for seemingly innocent content to honor your mum could end up with a malware infection.

Mac users who happen upon a poisoned search result it will pop up a fake anti-virus scanner written in JavaScript that looks just like the OS X Finder application.

Oh dear me, is that some wolves I hear howling in the distance?

Fact is that the day will come when Macs, iPhones, iPads become equal opportunity targets for malware and all those other nasties out there and no amount of quote stuff into a quasi post by John Gruber will change that.

It’s just a matter of time.