"Parcel Undelivered" Email spam targets Mac OS X users

One of the advantages that Mac users usually boast about is that the operating system – from a security perspective – is safer than its Windows counterpart.

Mac computers are not immune to malware

After all, it has a secure infrastructure and the majority of threats you face online are designed to work only on the Windows based operating systems.

For the most part, those Mac users are right, but it is important not to get complacent and assume that the Apple operating systems are immune, because they’re not.

This was highlighted by The Naked Security blog from Sophos this week who spotted an email scam doing the rounds that targeted Mac users.

The scam was wholly unoriginal in its design in fact. The email was the classic “parcel undelivered” scam that told the email recipient that they missed a parcel delivery and that they needed to visit a website (or open an attachment) in order to retrieve the parcel. We mentioned the scam in our blog post earlier outlining some common email malware attacks.

Upon visiting the website linked to from the email, the webpage was able to launch a malware attack for those using the Safari web browser, which downloaded an application to the user’s computer disguised as a harmless PDF file. Opening the PDF would execute the malware.

 

Don’t get lulled into a false sense of security if you’re using a Mac. You still need to be cautious and you still need to use antivirus protection.

If you’re looking for good security protection, we generally recommend BitDefender antivirus for Macs if you want to install reputable third party software.