2011
MacDefender popped up in mid-2011. It mimicked the widely deployed and largely successful scareware scams that have been owning Windows machines for years. The phishing scam worked by redirecting Mac-users from legitimate websites to fake ones that attempted to convince users that their computers were infected with a virus. Of course, as is always the case with such scams, their computers wouldn’t be infected with anything, until they downloaded the fake antivirus software that the fraudulent websites offered to remedy the non-existent problem. In the end, the MacDefender payload was designed to pilfer credit card information.
