In the last weeks, Adobe has updated his Flash Player very often and it seems that some hackers have thought that they can infect some computers with scareware.
First of all, you will notice a warning message while browsing, which says that your Flash Player is out of date and it is asking you to install update to continue loading the webpage. By pressing the “OK” button, you will end up on a website that you’ve probably never heard of it.
Keep in mind that the hackers don’t rely on any software vulnerability, but instead they are just using a simple trick that has been used for years already. Unfortunately, not all of us are experienced with these types of scams and many will fall for it and get the scareware inside their Macs.
Keep in mind that the scareware installer was signed with an Apple developer certificate, which means it will allow the malware to bypass a key defense that is built into the modern versions of OS X. With other words, the computers that run on OS X will prevent malicious code from infecting your PC by allowing you to run programs that have been downloaded only from the official App Store or which come from “identified developers”. This means that the scareware makes the OS X believe that it can be trusted and the code is allowed to be executed.
Once the malicious installer is running, the victim will be prompted to continue with the installation of the legitimate version of Flash. At the end, scareware and other potential unwanted application will be installed on the victim’s computer and it will pop up bogus security warnings, which will redirect the victim to the hacker’s webpage, choosing or it will even force the victim to install malicious browser extensions.
To avoid this kind of scams, we suggest you to be always suspicious if an application tells you that you have some security issues on your computer and that you need to install or update something in order to fix the issue, as most of these types of messages are scams.