The dawn of OS X malware

sign It’s been almost five years since the release of OS X 10.0.0, and along the way there’s been very little to worry about in the way of malware. That changed last week with the announcement of a trojan that propagates via iChat in a semi-automated way, then a Java worm that attempts to disseminate itself via Bluetooth.

Both of these are relatively innocuous, but there’s not much standing in the way of copycat efforts with more dangerous payloads.

It’s a good time to get familiar with ClamXav, the open source anti-virus package.


Matt Rose commented on Mon Feb 20 12:25:13 2006:

OS X malware? It’s a social engineering hack, if anything at all.

The first:

  1. It doesn’t disguise the fact that it’s an application, other than saying it’s a tarball of pictures.
  2. It asks for your password to install itself.
  3. If you’re not an admin user, it does nothing.

malware usually uses some kind of trickery to install itself, other than REALLY dumb users.

The second hasn’t actually been seen in the wild, and expires on thursday.

I realize that this is something of a huge deal for a platform that hasn’t seen an attack yet, but if this is anywhere near the cream of the crop for black-hat exploits, I’m still not worried.


Paul commented on Mon Feb 20 13:49:57 2006:

That’s the thing – I don’t think these get anywhere near what a more determined, careful, and/or mean perpetrator might accomplish. My advice about installing ClamXav is definitely about the (presumed) next wave, not this one.



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