Apple of discord
As Apple’s popularity grows, so does the desire among fraudsters to make money from the people who own the company’s devices. The cybercriminals are aiming to steal Apple ID data which provides access to users’ personal information stored in iCloud (e.g., photographs, contacts, documents, email, etc.) as well as to the purchases made in the company’s iTunes Store. Many malicious users go further and try to the steal bank card details used to pay for those purchases.
The scammers make use of phishing sites that imitate the official apple.com site. Since the beginning of 2012 until the present time this has resulted in a significant increase in the number of web antivirus detections triggered by users of our products attempting to visit such sites. During that period we have seen on average around 200,000 detections per day. By contrast, in 2011 the figure stood at around 1,000 detections per day.
Heuristic analyzer detections from January 2012 to May 2013 (detections per day)