I monitor these sorts of things and I thought I’d share it with all of you. To Mac users, this will come as no surprise but those of you bemoaning all your PC problems, this should be of at least some mild interest.

Macintosh Malware

A company known as F_Secure, who watches the computer malware scene as a big part of what they do, just released the latest statistics on Macintosh malware. No surprise that there was a grand total of ZERO, NADDA, ZILCH viruses OR worms for the Mac in 2011. There were 58 attempts at Trojan horses or backdoor attacks.

By the way, according to the article, there does not seem to be a correlation between the amount of malware for Mac and market share.

Full story can be found here

Windows Malware

On the other side, Windows attacks are still growing at an alarming rate. Compared to 1.5 million malware variants for Windows in 2009 and slightly over a million in the first half of 2010 alone, 58 doesn’t seem so bad. In fact, as the article above puts it, it’s “almost negligibly minuscule.” It almost makes you wonder why Norton and the others even bother to write protection for us Mac folks, but I’m glad they do. There could have been 60!

Breakdown of Windows, Unix and Java malware

I have only four words for this post…

I told you so

http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/1/20/android-trojan-captures-credit-card-details/

When you’re asked the question, “Debit or credit” what do you think is the right answer?

If it’s a debit card, it can be used either way and the choice is frequently yours to make.

There’s a good article on debit vs credit at About.com. One of the important things they forgot to mention is the danger of a debit card if it get used by a thief.

You, the cardholder, have protection from fraudulent use of both debit and credit cards. But the debit protections are much tighter. Remember that a debit transaction will require a PIN and the assumption is that you, and you alone, know the PIN. So, as they say, you’re going to have some ‘splaining to do. In addition, the time to report the fraudulent transaction is shorter.

But there’s a more serious consequence of fraudulent use of a debit card. The bad guy can clean out your bank in seconds. This leaves you with a zero balance that you won’t know about as you merrily write checks that are going to bounce. Now you’ve got a real nightmare on your hands. It could take weeks to straighten it all out, and that’s assuming that you can convince the bank that your PIN was compromised and do it in two days.

The bottom line; be vigilant.

If you use your debit card, go on line and check your balance daily.

Credit or debit — never let the card out of your site.

Be suspicious of anyone in the area using a cell phone. Many of them can capture video and thus your PIN entry.

Here is today’s credit card related news for consumers. Be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed for daily updates!

http://paper.li/tag/creditcard

If you need justification for checking your credit card statement, this would be a good one. How about an online scam running for four years, debiting accounts, 1.35 million of them, by as little as $0.25 at a time. The debits were put into the accounts of bogus merchants set up by the scammers aided by unsuspecting mules throughout the U.S.

According to the FTC, the source of the stolen cards is unknown but I would be willing to bet that at least a good part of them came from the ongoing credit and debit card data breaches perpetrated by Albert Gonzalez and his bunch. After all, he got 170 million card accounts.

Out of the 1.35 Million consumers bilked out of these small sums, only 78,724 thefts were reported. This pretty much convinces me that a lot of you folks aren’t checking your credit card statements like you should be. Every statement. Every month. Every time.

You read about it almost every day. You see it on Television. You even get warnings on your statements. But apparently you aren’t doing it.

Don’t think for a minute that it can’t happen to you. It can. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will. I promise. Those 170 million card numbers that the Gonzalez gang got is two-thirds of the population of the United States. Those card numbers did not go to jail with Gonzalez. They are still out there in the hands of the fraudsters. And there are a lot more bad guys out there still hard at work to steal your money.

Source:
Computerworld article