Apple Fans Play With Fire In The Malware Sandpit

VirusTotal Lets Apple Fans Play With Fire In The Malware Sandpit

Google’s VirusTotal has begun running Mac apps in Sandpit environments to test for malware and malicious activity.

The move has come not a moment too soon for many Apple users. Malware, and especially adware is at an all-time high.

A report released in October by Bit9, claimed that more malware had been discovered on Apple operating systems in 2015, than had been found in the previous five years in total.VirusTotal, owned by Google, is an online virus scanner. It is popular with both everyday users, and industry professionals, and is free to use.

The VirusTotal website allows users to upload suspicious files and have them be scanned by 54 different antivirus products.

Big Names

Among the antivirus scanners utilized are some big industry names, including:

• Avast
• Avira
• ESET
• Panda
• McAfee

Having the ability to scan any file you deem ‘dodgy’ by 54 of the world’s leading anti-malware companies is reassuring to most users. Installing that many antivirus products on any ordinary PC or Laptop would be a recipe for disaster, and not reasonably practical.

Total Peace Of Mind?

That said, while its scan results can normally be relied upon, a clean VirusTotal scan is no guarantee of 100% safety.

It is becoming more and more common these days for malware to try and outsmart anti malware scans.

Some malware variants are now programmed with the explicit intent of detecting whether or not it is being ran in a sandbox or not.

The battle is an endless cat and mouse game between virus programmers and the anti-virus researchers. Malware programmed this way may either shut down, go silent, or launch counter measures to try to remain undetected.

New Front

VirusTotal’s latest attempt is to now physically execute (run) suspicious Mac apps submitted by individual users inside a sandbox environment, in an effort to gather information that might help improve the detection and analysis of Mac Malware