Vincent Arnold

Commentary: I guess you know you have truly arrived as an OS when you start getting trojans. Yeah, get a Mac so you don’t get viruses like Windows they said. Bear in mind, I use Windows mostly, Linux as required and rarely use a Mac. So for me, I don’t like seeing security breaches of any kind but you never say “never” ever…It ALWAYS comes back to bite you in that lower padded backside area.

New Apple Trojan Means Mac Hunting Season Is Open

The Mac has officially gone mainstream.

The proof? On Halloween, professional online criminals were found using Trojan-horse software to target, for the first time, computers running Apple’s OS X operating system — just as they have been doing for years on the more ubiquitous flavors of Windows.

“Apple’s day has finally come, and Apple users are going to get hit hard,” security researcher Gadi Evron said. “OS X is the new Windows 98.”

The Trojan comes disguised as a video-decoding plug-in that users are told they must install to watch free porn clips. Instead, the software burrows into the operating system and diverts some of the victim’s future web surfing to sites under the attacker’s control. It’s the professional attack on Macs that the security community has long predicted, according to Dave Marcus, security research manager at McAfee’s Avert Lab, who said it was “written by people who know how to write malware.”

Source: Wired

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 4:31 am and is filed under Attack Vector.