14 DAY TRIAL // Veteran security expert Graham Cluley is sounding the alarm regarding a hoax that’s making the rounds on the web, tricking unwary Mac users that their computers are secretly designed to work as Bitcoin mining machines.
The ad in question reads, “Since 2009 Apple included a Bitcoin mining software into all their products which first needs to be unlocked. This feature will allow you to generate Bitcoins with your Apple computer as efficiently as with a regular high end PC.”
It then continues with instructions on how to allegedly unlock this feature when, in reality, the Terminal command provided actually wipes all the user’s data (including photos, videos, music, and other kinds of files).
Falling for it is really easy, as all you have to do is open Terminal and execute following code: “sudo rm -rf/*”
“And that, of course, would be a big mistake,” writes Graham Cluley, a former security consultant at Sophos. “Because typing rm -rf/* on a Unix system (including Mac OS X) tells your computer to delete all of your files and folders. Yes, your data just got flushed down the toilet.”
“That’s one of the problems with the internet. It’s not always easy to tell when someone is joking,” Cluley adds.
He advises everyone to ignore this fake ad and consider doing regular backups, just in case something similar hits the web in the future.
“Once again, do be careful about trusting what you read on the internet and learn to get advice from legitimate sources before doing something perhaps foolish with your computer.. Oh, and maybe it’s time you started doing regular backups too,” says the veteran antivirus specialist.
Cluley also defends Mac users from people getting “too smug about the misfortune of their Apple-loving cousins, [as] it’s easy to imagine how a similar hoax could be spread targeting gullible Windows users.”