Trojan/backdoor tool targetting OS X

[The Dude]

http://news.zdnet.com/2424-9595_22-251586.html

Two pieces of malicious software affecting Apple's Mac OS X appeared this week: a Trojan horse with the ability to download and install malicious code of an attacker's choice, and a hacker tool for creating backdoors, according to security vendors. [more]

Its sad that Macs arent even safe anymore........

[John A]

Macs are actually very safe; it's the users that are dumb. This is actually old news for the most part, a Trojan that's already been around for a year now has just been upgraded to version 2.0. You still need to be surfing porn sites to even find the Trojan in the first place, you still need to download and install a program that claims to be a media player plugin from some random site, and most of all, you still need to enter the administrator username and password before the Trojan can do anything.

This isn't much of an achievement for the malware author; I could write a similar one for a Linux system, but of course the press wouldn't take any interest because it's not targeting the operating system that's been hailed as immune from malware (which is, of course, impossible for any usable OS).

I'm pretty sure that no other operating system has as much malware available for it than Windows XP, which can be almost entirely attributed to the way that permissions are handled on it. Vista, OS X, and the other *nix's have much more sophisticated permissions, making it far more difficult to write malware that can compromise an entire system (at least, not without the administrator's password).

[The Dude]

Ah thank you for that John,

Yes all things like this are avoidable....

Some people when they get that "Plugin" request they just install (They dont know)

Sometimes i get those and i just check the script and extract the media link and watch it that way.... (The plug in isnt needed but most ppl dont know that)

[jbennet]

Macs are actually very safe; it's the users that are dumb

same for windows