Kaspersky caught 1.6 million phishing attacks disguised as the Apple brand in the first six months of 2019.
Apple users like to think their devices are a bit safer than other brands, but a new report from Kaspersky shows that cybercriminals are increasingly trying to attack Mac customers.
Kaspersky’s mid-year “Threats to MacOS Users” report highlights just how many attacks the company stops for its customers.
Cyberwarfare has already begun. Unlike nuclear weapons, cyberweapons can be proliferated more quickly and the threat from accidentally setting them off is even greater.
In only the first six months of 2019, the number of phishing attacks disguised using the Apple brand grew to 1.6 million. Kaspersky said the total number of phishing attacks have grown exponentially since 2015, when there were only 852,293 attacks. Just in the first half of this year, 5,932,195 attacks were committed, the report stated.
“The owners of MacBooks and iMacs are only rivaled by Linux users in terms of the level of confidence in their own security, and we must admit that they are right to a certain degree: Compared to Windows-based systems, there are far fewer threats that target macOS,” said Kaspersky researchers Mikhail Kuzin, Tatyana Shcherbakova, Tatyana Sidorina and Vitaly Kamluk, in a press release.
However, the press release continued, that situation is changing, since the popularity of the latter platform is growing. “Due to this and despite all the efforts that have been taken by the company, the threat landscape for Apple devices is changing, and the amount of malicious and unwanted software is growing,” stated the release.
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