Sunday, November 04, 2007
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New Apple Trojan Means Mac Hunting Season Is Open
New Apple Trojan Means Mac Hunting Season Is Open

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2007/11/mac_trojan

By Ryan Singel
Wired.com
11.01.07

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."

The arrival of the Mac Trojan signals that cybercrooks have decided
there are finally enough Apple systems on the internet to make attacking
them profitable, according to security experts. Apple is the nation's
No. 3 desktop and laptop seller in the United States, behind Dell and
Hewlett Packard. And this year, the Cupertino company accounted for an
impressive 8.1 percent of the personal-computer market for the third
quarter, up nearly two percentage points from the same period a year
ago. Evron and other observers predict that black hats will have a field
day with Macs, as well as with Apple's new mobile platforms.

"With 2 million iPhones and iPod Touches, it makes sense they will think
of them as an evolving market to exploit, and there are a lot of new Mac
users who aren't as savvy as Mac's earlier users," said CEO Alex
Eckelberry of Sunbelt Software, which sells security software for
Windows machines.

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Sunday, November 04, 2007 6:19:59 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  |  Related posts:
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