New Trojans Found in Apple Macs

[Max Dob]

:-/

I have am getting an Apple Mac Pro Desk Top as well as keeping XP and Vista PC's.

I have always been told that Apple Macs do not have the same problem with Virus and Trojans.

I have just read at http://www.crn.com/security/208800199 about Two new Apple Trojans.

Can anyone tell me how good MacScan is and any good alternatives?

Any problems If I use the MacScan Virus Control for Apple. All information will be very helpful.

Thanks

[selfhelpebooks]

Hi there,
Welcome aboard.
Feel free to post your question in the appropriate forum here.
Good luck!

[Ancient Dragon]

moved

[John A]

One of the Trojans gains root access without requiring a password by exploiting a gaping security hole in Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 via ARDAgent, the remote desktop daemon. To protect yourself against it, open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal, and run the following command:

sudo chmod 0555 \
/System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/\
Contents/MacOS/ARDAgent

enter your password, and the setuid bit will be removed from the application.

There is no known workaround for protecting yourself against the Poker virus at this time. Good luck.

[jaxjason]

First and foremost, use some common sense whenever your downloading from the web. A Modern "Poker game" is never going to be 180K on either windows or mac. (one of them is a 80k compressed "Poker game")

Second, a Trojan requires that you must install the program yourself, and most macs will ask before it runs the program,asking if it is trusted, if it detects that the program was downloaded from a web site. Even giving you the opportunity to visit the website.

The ARDAgent one does not say how it is received, but it is still called a trojan. By definition, this requires the user to install it manually. again, be careful on any machine installing things you don't know the author of.

Virus' are a completely different story, I know of no virus' in the wild that install themselves automatically and transmit information or anything, for the macs. All I have ever heard about is Trojans like these. And those are very rare. Thats why they make the news.

here is a windows list for you http://www.symantec.com/business/security_response/threatexplorer/azlisting.jsp
Thousands of Windows viruses and trojans, a few mac trojans. Your still thousands of times safer on a mac than a win PC.

Personally I have never had a virus hit my mac, old or new systems and have never had virus protection on them. Thats been ten years now. Just common sense usually prtects me enough.

Good luck,
Jason