If you’ve ever wondered why people write malware, it’s just like anything else — it’s all about the money. Symantec has worked out that the evil-doing bottom-feeders behind that nasty Flashback trojan, which caught the Mac world with its pants down, were raking in around $US10,000 a day.
Apparently, Flashback was cheating Google out of ad money on a colossal scale, redirecting clicks and banking the cash. With hundreds of thousands of users unknowingly infected, all those tiny 5p clicks quickly added up, and that was just one variant of the Trojan.
With that much money on the line, it’s no wonder Macs have become a target — Windows users are supposedly wiser to these kinds of things. In theory it’s a lot easier, once you’ve actually managed to get onto a Mac, to hide-out there earning serious money. Now that they’ve successfully proved Macs are vulnerable and made a hatful of money in the process, don’t expect the Mac to escape Windows-style virus hell — where there’s a will, there’s a way. [Symantec via MacWorld UK]
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