'It is genuinely tragic that such a large number of OS X users are falling victim to this scam, and Apple's response is less than helpful.' 'Apple's famous PR savvy apparently doesn't apply to handling security incidents,' Chet Wisniewski, a Sophos security researcher, said in a post on his company's blog on Tuesday. Those tech support representatives told Bott, and provided documents, that said Apple had told them not to help Mac users who had been duped into downloading and installing MacDefender.īoth Intego and U.K.-based Sophos have used the information Bott has published and his estimates of the number of Macs infected to also take Apple to task. In several posts over the last week, ZDNet blogger Ed Bott - who usually covers Microsoft and Windows topics - laid out information he had received from insiders at Apple support. 'Why should the hackers reinvent the wheel?'Īpple has taken criticism for not publicly responding to the MacDefender threat. 'That shouldn't have surprised anyone,' Storms said today. Last week, Microsoft said it had found evidence in MacDefender that the fake program was created by the same group responsible for a fast-growing scareware family aimed at Windows users. MacDefender was the first piece of professional-looking scareware to target Macs.

Once installed, such software nags users with pervasive pop-ups and fake alerts until they fork over a fee to purchase the worthless program.

Scareware and rogueware are terms for bogus security software that claims a personal computer is heavily infected with worms, viruses and other malware. MacDefender - which also goes by names such as MacProtector and MacSecurity - first popped up earlier this month when French security company Intego said it had found the scareware in the wild.

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