Mac Is The Focus of New Malware

In the old days, before the rise of the iPad and iPhone, hackers were mostly content to leave Apple alone. They had such a tiny slice of the computer market that it was generally deemed as being more trouble than it was worth to create a virus that would only impact such a small number of devices.

Identity Thieves Use Social Media To Gain Personal Information

Identity theft is a large, pervasive, and growing problem. In fact, statistics show that the instances of identity theft jumped a staggering 57% last year alone, this, according to figures from the fraud-prevention service Cifas.

The firm’s research into the increase of identity theft found that much of the growth has seen fraudsters targeting a younger demographic (ages 30 and under), with 24,000 victims in this age group in 2015, compared with 15,766 in 2014, and 11,000 victims in this age group in 2010.

In order to successfully assume a person’s identity, the first order of business is to obtain as much personal information as possible.

Ransomware Is Now Hitting Mobile Phones

Ransomware has become one of the fastest growing cybercrimes of 2016. Worse, these attacks are growing in their sophistication, and the hackers deploying ransomware have been upping their game by branching out onto different systems.

As evidence, according to data provided by Kaspersky Lab, the number of users being attacked by mobile ransomware has quadrupled from last year to this.

New Malware Is Attacking Smart TV’s And Android Devices

Ransomware is becoming an epidemic. It’s one of the fastest growing kinds of attacks we’re seeing in 2016, and the hacking community has shown a tremendous appetite for expanding the scope and scale of their operations.

PCs and laptops were, of course, obvious targets for this kind of attack, but we’re now seeing strains of ransomware that can attack smartphones, and lock you out of them, just like the software locks you out of your PC. There’s even at least one strain of ransomware that targets smart TVs.

Of course, for these types of software to work, the user has to be tricked into running the poisoned app and giving it administrator permissions, but there are tried and true methodologies for doing so.