First Mac Virus?
This post was published 3 years 9 months 5 days ago and its content may not be valid anymore.Ladies and Gentlemen, the day has come…
Yesterday, we asked the question “What would happen when a virus hits the Mac?”. Less then twenty four hours after the question, reports has surfaced that a virus/trojan is spreading rapidly in the MacOS community.
Basically: The file was named “latestpics.tgz” which decompresses into a compiled Unix executable in disguise. Then the resulted Unix file then begin to replicate and distribute over IM.
Temporary solution, secure delete the file, and that should stop the propagation, but nobody fully understands the nature of this trojan.
If you would like to find out about this in more detail, please read the following topic:
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=102379
It explains what the little app does and how it does it. It is not really a virus, since it requires user interaction. It is more like a Trojan. It does not do harm, but because of a bug in the code, it can break current applications (stop them from running).
It’s impossible for any operating system to be secure, unless it’s really simple (e.g. a calculator)..
ahaaahahahha
It’s not a virus, it’s a trojan. For someone to get infected they have to:
1. Download the file
2. Uncompress it
3. Run it (at this point there’s already one, if not two warnings)
4. Enter the admin password
Doesn’t really spread if you catch my drift :D
Macs have had viruses before. But you never hear of them because they don’t affect as many people. I vaugely remember a few years ago when i was told that someone had programmed a virus into an ID3 tag on an mp3 that affected both mac and windows. Not sure how accurate that source was, but the point is, macs have had viruses before. Maybe like 50 compared to the billions available for PC.
There is a reason that Norton Antivirus is available for mac, but most people either dont know, or are comfortable enough not to use it.
Don’t forget about the “Autostart Virus”!
NAV for the Mac detects Windows viruses only. It’s hard to detect a Mac virus if no-one has ever seen one. Try to find a definition of a MacOSX virus on the Symantec site. You won’t.
There were a heap of viruses for pre-MacOSX operating systems and a prominent one was Autostart 9802.
ClamXAV is supposed to detect virus-like activity and it’s about all there is as far as real Mac anti-virus software goes. Symantec are selling snake oil.
Only the retards will get infected.