Friday, October 23, 2009

Macintoshes, Not as safe as you think



Most of us are familiar with the Macintosh "feature" that they are supposedly less suceptible to viruses and hacks in general than Windows computers. Apple has put this out there in its marketing and TV commercials. Both implicitly (in the case of "just wanting an computer to work") and in explicitly in overt claims that the mac platform is virus free.
Trendmicro, the home of Housecall free online virus-scanning service has recently published a little piece about Macintosh security threats.
The Article details 4 trojan type threats which prey upon the ease of installation which Apple computers are known for.
Two of these trojans are inserted into pirated versions of Mac software, iWork 09 and Snow Leopard, which once installed compromise the security of the systems. Apparently these have been making their way around the torrenting community
One of the trojans uses an age old trick from the Windows side. The executable file presented as a pornographic video gambit.
The fourth is not so much a security threat as just bad sportsmanship. A "free" program known as Macsweeper (not to be confused with Mac Sweeper) will do a systems scan and reccomend a course of action. However at this point you must pay to continue! Also pushing it over into the malware category is the difficulty of removing the Macsweeper program. Apperanlt it has also surfaced as Imunizator.
I would like to also add that Macs, being based on the BSD unix platform are often able to be compromised from the shell session prompt. Not a lot of folks are familiar with the workings of Unix, but there are still those of us out there that remember logging into University Unix servers and using VI, nano etc.

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