The black hat industry coining browser malware has seen a tremendous spike this year. Some of these infections entail iterative redirects of one’s web traffic, while others result in bothersome ads being displayed on sites. The new malicious Mac app called Extra Browser combines both of these adverse effects under the same umbrella. As the outbreak of this campaign is underway, keeping abreast with its details is an important prerequisite of tackling the attack.

A group of light-fingered cybercrooks have been running a deceptive campaign where Mac OS X users are misinformed about the presence of the Tapsnake virus on their systems. When surfing the web with their favorite browser, the targeted people suddenly bump into popup alerts that report said infection and recommend an application that will supposedly rectify the problem.

There is no such thing as a junk-free Mac, unless you have just bought it and turned it on for the first time. As the computer is being used, the web browsing activity and installed applications leave heaps of cache and temporary files behind that cram up the system with megabytes or even gigabytes of data you don’t need. The Mac Cleanup Pro software claims to find and delete this clutter, but it turns out to be a fake system utility at the end of the day.

Adware is a rapidly growing concern for Mac users. It spans apps that hijack web preferences and inject ads into visited sites without asking for permission. This fall, the sketchy activity appears to be reaching new heights with the emergence of pests like ForBrowser. It redirects victims’ Internet traffic to search engine copycats further leading to Yahoo or Bing, and it additionally causes the browser to crash off and on.

If you ask a cybersecurity analyst what form of malicious code is targeting Macs the most these days, they’ll tell you it’s adware. This cluster of viruses doesn’t hit the headlines too much due to its relatively mild impact, but the moneymaking potential is enough to incentivize the crooks to keep extending their reach. ManagerPages, for example, is one of the latest adware apps fully exemplifying the logic of this plague.

Browser-centric malware is taking the Mac world by storm. Rather than combat top-notch infections that utilize complex persistence techniques, the victims seem to be faced with the prosaic need for trashing some mischievous plugin and rectifying their Internet settings. Although this looks like good news and no big deal, the irritation caused by browser hijackers like SearchMine is huge, plus the cleanup isn’t as easy as it may appear.