This year was a tough one for U.S. Apple users and U.S.-run websites, according to Kaspersky Lab’s year-in-review blog post.

U.S. Apple users accounted for the largest portion of attacks on Mac OS X this year with 98,077 users being attacked, which accounted for 39 percent of all Mac OS X attacks Kaspersky documented.

This trend toward U.S. users could be for an obvious reason, said Patrick Nielsen, senior security researcher, Kaspersky Lab. Put simply, Americans use Apple computers more than other documented countries.

“As Macs have grown in market share we have seen a matching correlation with attacks,” he said. “It’s just that they’ve become much more interesting to attackers.”

More than 3 million attempts to infect Mac OS X-based computers were blocked this year, as compared to 1,363,549 blocked attempts on Android-based devices.

The U.S. also topped the list of countries where online resources were seeded with malware. The U.S. accounted for 27 percent of infected online resources. Germany came in second at 16 percent. Again, Nielsen said, that could simply be attributed to many of the most popular websites being based in the U.S, which would offer a wealth of possible victims.

Although attacks continue to trend upward on all devices, one specific method did see a decrease in infection attempts: SMS trojan attacks.

Attacks on Russian citizens, in particular, dropped. The country had previously been a major target. The blog post says this drop could be attributed to mobile operators in Russia having to use an Advice of Charge mechanism, which requires the operator to inform a device owner of the cost of the service and get confirmation of the payment whenever a message is sent.

Read the Full Article: Source – SC Magazine
http://www.scmagazine.com/kaspersky-lab-releases-year-roundup-blog-post/article/388186/

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