Ipswich boy Ribald from the X century, turned the bark into a carrier of personal data, combining a drawing of his father and his name. Personal data is understood as a set of information that allows you to identify an individual - a set that unambiguously indicates a specific person. In some jurisdictions, like European countries, personal data is a broad term and may include various quasi-identifiers that may lead to the identification of a particular person.

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.

By rolling out the iOS 10.3 update in late March 2017, Apple has addressed a massive outbreak of Safari Mobile scareware, where iOS users would be blocked from using the browser due to a persistent hijack. Victims were confronted with recurrent redirects to legit-looking pages that displayed misleading “Cannot Open Page” popups and demanded money to remove the blocking.