ADOBE FLASH PLAYER VIRUS MAC HOW TO
I advise all Mac users to run an up-to-date anti-virus program, and exercise caution about the software they install onto their computers.įound this article interesting? Follow Graham Cluley on Twitter to read more of the exclusive content we post. How to stop/remove Fake Flash Player Update pop ups (Virus removal guide) In the step-by-step guide below we will have a look at the ad-supported software and how to get rid of Fake Flash Player Update from Firefox, Chrome and Safari browsers for Apple Mac, natively or by using a few free removal tools. And if the criminals are continuing to make money by infecting Apple Mac computers in this fashion, whatever makes you think that they’ll come up with a more original social engineering trick? Of course, you should only ever download your Adobe Flash updates (if you wish to run it at all) from Adobe itself.Īnd although many Mac users have little need for Adobe Flash in this day and age, clearly Kaspersky’s research shows that there are many who will go ahead and install the malicious update, and compromise their Mac computer. They click, and are greeted with a notification that they should install an update to Adobe Flash Player. There are already over 700 such domains in total.”Įventually, through whatever route, an unsuspecting user arrives at a webpage and sees the tempting content they wish to access. On the websites, the newly minted owner posted a malicious script that redirects users to Shlayer download landing pages. “These links were not added by the cybercriminals themselves: we found that all those malicious domains had recently expired, and, judging by the WHOIS data, they now belong to a single individual. Interestingly, Kaspersky’s research team says that the boobytrapped Wikipedia footnotes were not placed there by the malware distributors themselves:
Unsuspecting users might have been directed to the sites by search engines, malicious links posted in YouTube video descriptions, or even the footnotes of Wikipedia articles.
ADOBE FLASH PLAYER VIRUS MAC TV
Often Shlayer has been distributed via websites claiming to offer a live stream of a soccer match, software cracks, or posing as pirated episodes of popular TV shows. That means it’s possible that Kaspersky’s data is skewed because it is collated from Mac users who have chosen to run security software (and thus might consider themselves more at risk) or it might even mean that Kaspersky is actually *under-reporting* the true level of Shlayer activity because there is no insight on the computers which aren’t running an anti-virus. One caveat, of course, is that many Mac users are still not running any anti-virus.
Can “one in ten macOS users” really have been attacked by Shlayer as Kaspersky claims? It feels remarkable if true.