The maverick director and his trusted cast on making Kinds of Kindness, the ‘bonkers’ film causing a stir on the Croisette
Joe Alwyn, the British star of one of the most disturbing films to compete at the Cannes festival this year, has given his verdict on making the “bonkers” Kinds of Kindness, which features scenes of group sex, cannibalism and violence and in which Alwyn has to perform a drug rape on the character played by Oscar-winner Emma Stone. “You have to try not to unpack it all too much, or you get it stuck in your head,” he said on Saturday.
The 33-year-old, until now best known as a former partner of Taylor Swift, has been thrust into the glaring lights of Cannes this weekend, but has also had to survive entering the odd imagination of Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos. Alwyn said the best way to prepare himself for Lanthimos’s unsettling and explicit screen world had been to “trust him, trust him, trust him”. “It is bizarre and strange and bonkers and special,” Alwyn added, “but one of the reasons I love his films is because you feel it first, before you try to understand it all.”
Cannes film festival Yorgos Lanthimos reinforces how the universe keeps on doing the same awful things with a multistranded yarn starring Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Jesse Plemons
Perhaps it’s just the one kind of unkindness: the same recurring kind of selfishness, delusion and despair. Yorgos Lanthimos’s unnerving and amusing new film arrives in Cannes less than a year after the release of his Oscar-winning Alasdair Gray adaptation Poor Things. It is a macabre, absurdist triptych: three stories or three narrative variations on a theme, set in and around modern-day New Orleans.
An office worker finally revolts against the intimate tyranny exerted over him by his overbearing boss. A police officer is disturbed when his marine-biologist wife returns home after months of being stranded on a desert island, and suspects she has been replaced by a double. Two cult members search for a young woman believed to have the power to raise the dead.
Amira Yahyaoui, a human rights activist, promoted the success of her student aid start-up, Mos. Some of her statements do not add up, according to internal data and people familiar with the company.
We’re going to let you in on a little cybersecurity secret… There’s malware on Mac computers. There pretty much always has been.
As revealed in our 2024 ThreatDown State of Malware report, a full 11% of all detections recorded by Malwarebytes on Mac computers in 2023 were for different variants of malware—the catch-all term that cybersecurity researchers use to refer to ransomware, trojans, info stealers, worms, viruses, and more.
That 11% figure may not sound imposing but remember that many people today still believe that Apple devices, including Mac computers, are invulnerable to cyberinfections because of some sort of vague “Apple magic.”
In reality, “Apple magic” is more a byproduct of old advertising (this 2006 commercial from the “I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC” series did irreparable harm) and faulty conclusions concerning cybersecurity’s biggest breaches and attacks: People mistakenly believe that because most attacks target Windows computers and servers, no attacks target Macs.
The truth is far more nuanced, as the visible, overwhelming focus of cyberattacks on Windows machines is a consequence of Microsoft’s long-standing success in business computing.
For decades, every multinational corporation, every local travel agency, every dentist, every hospital, every school, government, and city hall practically ran on Windows. This mass adoption was good for Microsoft and its revenue, but it also drew and maintained the interests of cybercriminals, who would develop malware that could impact the highest number of victims. This is why the biggest attacks, even today, predominantly target Windows-based malware and the sometimes-unpatched vulnerabilities found in Windows software and applications.
Essentially, as Windows is the biggest target, cybercriminals zero in their efforts respectively.
But new information last year revealed that could all be changing.
Mac malware tactics shifted in 2023
Apple’s desktop and laptop operating system, macOS, represents a 31% share of US desktop operating systems, and roughly 25% of all businesses reportedly utilize Mac devices somewhere in their networks.
While the LockBit variant for Mac was not operational upon discovery, the LockBit ransomware gang said at the time that it was “actively being developed.” Fortunately, LockBit suffered enormous blows this year, and the ransomware gang is probably less concerned with Mac malware development and more concerned with “avoiding prison.”
Separately, in September 2023, Malwarebytes discovered a cybercriminal campaign that tricked Mac users into accidentally installing a type of malware that can steal passwords, browser data, cookies, files, and cryptocurrency. The malware, called Atomic Stealer (or AMOS for short) was delivered through “malvertising,” a malware delivery tactic that abuses Google ads to send everyday users to malicious websites that—though they may appear legitimate—fool people into downloading malware.
In this campaign, when users searched on Google for the financial marketing trading app “TradingView,” they were sometimes shown a malicious search result that appeared entirely authentic: a website with TradingView branding was visible, and download buttons for Windows, Mac, and Linux were clearly listed.
But users who clicked the Mac download button instead received AMOS.
This malvertising site mimics TradingView to fool users into downloading malware for different operating systems.
Just months later, AMOS again wriggled its way onto Mac computers, this time through a new delivery chain that has more typically targeted Windows users.
In November, Malwarebytes found AMOS being distributed through a malware delivery chain known as “ClearFake.” The ClearFake campaign tricks users into believing they’re downloading an approved web browser update. That has frequently meant a lot of malicious prompts mimicking Google Chrome’s branding and update language, but the more recent campaign imitated the default browser on Mac devices—Safari.
A template is used that mimics the official Apple websites and webpages to convince users into downloading a Safari “update” that instead contains malware.
“This may very well be the first time we see one of the main social engineering campaigns, previously reserved for Windows, branch out not only in terms of geolocation but also operating system.”
Replace “magic” with Malwarebytes
Cyberthreats on Mac aren’t non-existent, they’re just different. But different threats still need effective protection, which is where Malwarebytes Premium can help.
Malwarebytes Premium detects and blocks the most common infostealers that target Macs—including AMOS—along with annoying browser hijackers and adware threats such as Genieo, Vsearch, Crossrider, and more. Stay protected, proactively, with Malwarebytes Premium for Mac.
We don’t just report on threats—we remove them
Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.
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