Many Internet users do not believe that they can earn up to $20 a month selling their personal data. The latest scandal around Facebook shows that this statement has its right to exist. It turned out that Facebook has been running a secret Atlas project for more than two years, within which people get paid up to $20 a month for installing and using on their smartphones Facebook branded pseudo-VPN.

The sad truth is that the uncrackable security of macOS is a myth debunked quite a while ago. Ransomware, crypto miners, browser hijackers and adware compose an incomplete list of cyber threats successfully targeting this platform. To its credit, though, Apple keeps the scale of these attacks much lower than on competing operating systems, making malicious agents come up with non-standard workarounds like the recently discovered EFAIL compromise vector.

As the phenomenon of furtive cryptocurrency mining splashed onto the scene and took the world by storm, computer botnets underwent an apropos evolution. Rather than bolster spam campaigns spreading ransomware, they are now leveraged to combine numerous zombified machines into a huge Monero mining pool.

When decentralized digital currencies entered the scene, online payments made a huge step forward due to small transaction fees and a higher degree of privacy delivered by the cryptographic layer. As things started booming in this ecosystem, cybercriminals managed to find and occupy their own niche in it. Surreptitious mining of cryptocurrency is at the forefront of these shenanigans, and it is steadily rising on the Mac arena these days.

Compared to previous status quo on the cyber-threat landscape, online crooks are apparently taking their perpetrating activities a notch further as a new Ransomware-as-a-Service platform called MacRansom is underway. This malign framework is intended to make extortion through crypto malware as common for Macs as it is for Windows. The shady affiliate model in question allows would-be criminals to distribute viable Mac ransomware without investing any intellectual efforts in development.

The robustness of Apple’s security architecture for both their desktop and mobile platforms has prevented intruders from compromising the company’s customers on a large scale. And yet, some incidents do pop up once in a while. A group of black hat hackers claim to have gained access to hundreds of millions of accounts belonging to Apple clients.