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Large Prize Offered For Writing Mac Virus
Mordant writes "Some experienced Mac developers are offering a $25K prize to the first person to successfully infect two 'naked' Internet-connected Macs running stock Apple software. The best part is that if any Symantec employee succeeds in infecting the Macs, the prize goes up to $50K (Symantec has been fanning the flames of totally bogus "Macs aren't more secure, it's just that Windows is a bigger target" technical-equivalence propaganda)!" Update: 03/26 20:24 GMT by Z : Well, that was quick. Jack Campbell has cancelled the contest, after he "...was contacted by a large number of Mac users, and Mac software professionals who shared their thinking with me about the contest."
This has got to be one of the stupidest contests of this type I've heard about.
1) If a virus has spread over every Mac on the Internet, then it's harmful.
2) Many people would say that ANY virus is harmful, just by virtue of it being a virus (spreading, infecting.)
3) I'm so sure it's worth $50,000 for Symantec to finally put that "Antivirus companies don't write viruses" myth to bed.
4) We're going to use antivirus software to determine if we've been infected... which will only catch previously known viruses.
5) Hey you guy that wrote the virus that spread to every Mac on the Internet: just identify yourself afterwards, and we'll pay you.
for days when someone suceeds at this. Never dare someone to do stuff like this, it is just too tempting of a target.
Nice balanced submission you got there. As far as I'm aware there is no conclusive evidence that shows Macs are inherently more secure and would not suffer the virus problem that Windows does if it had Windows' market share. Note that a lot of the virus problem comes from users showing bad practice (clicking 'Yes' to install things they really shouldn't, opening attachments they really shouldn't). I wouldn't be suprised if Mac users were on average more savy, and this could contribute.
This is the notorious Jack Campbell, one of the shadiest characters around. It's undoubtedly a publicity stunt for his business. What a jerk.
Even a virus would be more useful.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
They aren't asking for source code to the virus, or the virus to be sent to them (and only to them) in a polite form, they're leaving two Macs exposed to the net and expecting to pick a winner by what their virus scanning software finds. You claim the money by sending them a 32 character string that appears in the virus.
If you got a virus to them this way, I think the $25k would only begin to cover your legal bills.
A computer is only as secure as its user. Are they going to man these two naked Macs with total noobs, to make it a fair contest?
Something tells me it's unlikely you'd ever see the cash, even if you were to succeed.
Google for Jack Campbell and MacTable for more info on this guy's shady past.
And after 3 months, it ends up being a virus that requires WINE.
Would you accept the word of a locksmith telling you that your current locks aren't sufficient and that you should give him lots more money to put new locks on your house if he cannot SHOW you how easy it is for him to pick your current locks?
It's time for Symantec to put up or shut up. Either Macs do need their software AND they can prove it or they're just pushing their software with lies.That's an awful big "if".That's a real problem. Either the virus writer has to modify an existing virus so that its signature is picked up, or send the virus software companies a copy of his virus so they can update their signature files.That's about how it will go.
Either someone has to show how it can be done, or Symantec needs to shutup about how vulnerable Macs are.
Personally, I don't see much of a problem there.
Worms attack through ports.
Viruses load themselves into memory and infect other files.
Trojans only run when you launch them.
From the article, it looks as if they're hunting for worms or exploitable holes in apps. But the most common Windows-side issues now are trojans emailing themselves to everyone.
I am calling bullshit on this obvious lie. You had a clean instal, behind a firewall, with all the service packs installed, and in just 10 minutes after that with a direct connection to the net, someone infected it with spyware? That has to be bullshit.
I have been running Windows 2000 for years, and there is no spyware. And I am not doing anything special. I make sure to fdisk the mbr before an instal, just to make sure someone did not hide something on the hard drive before the instal. I do the instal off-line. Add a software firewall, then connect through a router to the net to get the service packs. I have never had any spyware on my system ever. I disable active-x from IE, and when I did my instal the only net protocol I install is tcp/ip, I do not instal the other 2- client or file & printer sharing.
Come on, when will all this anti-windows BS stop? The only reason people can hack it is because users don't instal service packs and because they open links in emails that use active-x. I gaurentee if those two problems are resolved, it will become 99.9% harder to infect a machine- a hacker would not just be able to run software, he would have to know your system and activly fight to get in, which would be too much work for him.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Too bad this is being sponsored by a manufacturer of rather poor-quality products. For example, they make a product called the SightFlex which appears to be the ideal iSight stand. So, I bought one... The camera caused all sorts of problems on the FireWire bus, so I contacted Jack at MacMice. The long thread of emails ended in my not receiving a response to a request for a working product, although Jack did suggest opening up the SightFlex and wrapping aluminum foil around the wires in the base.
t ing
;)
So, I opened it up and here's what I found: http://www.nuxx.net/gallery/sightflex_troubleshoo
Great, huh? Nicely random scattered, poorly soldered wires in the base, not all twisted up like they are supposed to be in a FireWire cable.
I would have pursued the issue further, but the cheap plastic base of the device ended up breaking when I was moving it around one day. It seems that the flexible metal of the neck is just threaded into some fairly thin plastic in the base (again, see pictures) and the rather brittle plastic just up and broke one day.
Great idea, piss poor execution.
And, it is exactly becuase of this sort of product why I will never trust DVForge / MacMice again, no matter how noble the cause may be.
After my experience, I'd think that they are offering $25,000 in monopoly money. Note that they never say US Dollars, so you can't fault them if they pay up in fake bills.
Of course it's running fine. After I root a box I always make sure I keep the patches up to date. Daddy has to keep his hoes clean you know!
It had better be more than $50K for a Symantec Employee: according to my employment contract, writing a virus will result in my immediate termination. Such termination also means that I forfit all my stock options, worth far more than $50K at this point. And not to mention a great paying job with annual bonuses worth about half the original award.
So from an economic standpoint I'd be seriously in the hole, trading in options and bonuses worth a hell of a lot more than the amount being offered from a rather shady source.
No way!
So the summary claims that Mac OS X is technically more secure than Windows. Then why has this well-known root exploit in iSync not been fixed even after several security updates and one system update, and despite that Apple has apparently been notified?
That worries me -- this bug is trivial to exploit from any user account (just compile and run). It smells like Microsoft-esque security practices.
FWIW, my temporary fix was to revoke the vulnerable file's setuid and execute permissions:
(Note: omit any spurious spaces and linebreaks Slashdots inserts here.)
Jack Campbell, who is behind this, has been behind a number of rather dubious projects. There's a page about him at Macintouch http://www.macintouch.com/mactable.html.
What a HUGE surprise. The linked page now explains, almost sorrowfully, why he decided to call it off. Read the last paragraph for a real laugh.
Sending an executable as a mail attachment is easy, but fooling a user into launching is is much harder on the Mac than it is on Windows.
Unlike Windows, the MacOS uses filesystem embedded filetype and resource fork information to determine what kind of file a file is. You can't just change the filename into photo.jpg or letter.doc to make the attachment look like a photo or a word document. If it is an executable, the Mac will show it as such.
This means you will have to convince the user that the ececutable in question comes from a trusted source and that it is safe to launch. Even then, MacOS X will open a dialog that explains to the user that this is the first time this application is about to be launched, that it might be dangerous and then ask if the user wants to proceed. At that point most Mac users will cancel if they are not sure what this application is and where it came from.
But even if they proceed to launch the application, then the application still won't be able to install anything on the user's machine. If it tries to do that, the user will again be notified that some software is about to be installed and that an administrator password is required to do so.
Somebody would have to be incredibly naive to ignore all the warnings and still proceed.
This type of attack is rather unlikely to be successful in causing a spreading of the trojan. The propagation mechanism is far too weak. The news about such an attack will be all over the net before the trojan had a chance to propagate.
If anybody is to succeed with an attack against the Mac, it would have to be an exploit of some security flaw in the OS or in a privileged application.
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm
On this subject, I recently answered a query raised during a Chronicle of Higher Education colloquy. I believe it touches on the major issues here.
Question from Lisa L. Spangenberg, UCLA:
Given that there are no viruses or Trojan horses for the current Macintosh system, OS X 10.3, and given that it is essentially UNIX, and given that the most common applications (Microsoft Office Suite, Adobe applications) work very well on OS X, why don't more institutions adopt Macs and encourage faculty to use them?
Gregory A. Jackson:
Well, first of all, there are viruses and Trojans that afflict MacOS, witness Apple's periodic release of security fixes to counteract them.
First, that isn't true, regarding viruses. To date, there are no known viruses that specifically target Mac OS X. Last week's "trojan" was nothing more than an application with a different icon and misleading name that displayed a dialog box (which was an example posted to a USENET Mac programming group to illustrate this fact that has been known and possible on Mac OS for over twenty years; an antivirus vendor apparently thought this an appropriate time to dress it up, incorrectly, as some new, terrible exploit easily adapted for malicious means, when in reality it's nothing more than an application).
If you're referring more broadly to security issues in general, almost all of the security and security-related updates for Mac OS X to date have been updates for primarily server-type services that ship with the OS, all of which are disabled by default, and the lion's share of which are never even enabled, much less touched, on the vast majority of systems. I'm not saying that they should be ignored, but Apple's comprehensive and swift response to the most minor security issues does not rise to the level of the staggeringly numerous, sometimes completely automated, remote exploits, worms, and so on for Windows. It is no longer possible to even get through a full installation Windows XP on a machine connected to a public network without it being exploited before you even have a chance to patch it.
It's definitely possible for Mac OS X to have viruses, worms, trojans, and other malware - Mac OS X is not invulnerable, and no sensible person would claim it to be. But the underlying philosophical design principles are fundamentally more secure than Windows, period. Since the major ingredient for the success of a worm or virus is some ability to spread, witness the fact that there is no way with anything built into Mac OS X to perform automated propagation of a virus, and no current known ways to exploit a machine remotely, not to mention that potentially exploitable network services are disabled to begin with anyway (and remain that way unless explicitly enabled), a stark contrast to Windows. Any hope for automatic propagation would require a comparatively high level of sophistication, and perhaps even its own mail server - not to mention some intrinsic vulnerability to exploit. On the other hand, there are still, to this moment, unfixed vulnerabilities in certain versions of Outlook that will spread certain virus variants simply by previewing a message, and nothing more. There is simply no equivalent to this on any other platform. Microsoft's track record and attitude on security (though admittedly much improved) versus other vendors speaks volumes on this topic.
It takes work and thought to do security, and do it right. Ease of use and security aren't mutually exclusive. The key is to make security easy to use, and Apple has so far been on the right road with Mac OS X.
But the small installed base of Macs makes them an unexciting, low-visibility target for the bad guys, and so the weaknesses don't get exploited much.
The marketshare argument only goes so far. This seems to be a version of the "Macs have no software" argument. It is indeed true that they are targeted less for this reason. But the argument that it's straight cause-and-effect is disingenuous
Tried to install any applications lately (like, say, OpenOffice)? The installer demands administrator access, and will REFUSE to continue unless it gets it. Even if you're only going to install it into /tmp or $HOME to check it out.
Try to compile F95 in GCC? You might be instructed to download a DMG of "up to date" cctools. But when you mount the drive, you get an installer, and this installer also demands administrator access, presumably so it can stomp on the tools already installed. And it's non-obvious where you go to get the source that will compile on the Mac so you can install it in a place of your own choosing.
Mac users are slowing being trained to be as dumb as MSWindows users. When the pretty little dialog asks for the administrator password, just provide it, otherwise you won't be able to play, and the maintainers of that package will mock you. Caution? What's that? Prudence? Soooo old-school. Paranoia? Get a life!
There's not much difference between being trained to grant a program administrative status every time it asks for it and running as the administrator all the time. It just adds a ten-second delay before your machine is compromised, and people can point at you and wonder aloud why you didn't _know_ what the program was going to do before it did it.
I'm not giving up my Mac in favor of anything out of Redmond. I just want a stick I can beat developers with when they write installers that demand administrative access and refuse to go further until they get it. If the user declines to give the administrative password, then let them choose where to install your software, and give them a README on what they can do "by hand" to integrate your software. IF they so choose.
Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
A quick visit to the website reveals that their
"Mac Virus Contest" is a totally bogus bit of
showmanship. ( From the: "Even bad publicity
is still publicity" Department ):
DVForge Virus Prize 2005
The Contest That, Sadly, WIll Never Be
Contest goal: To lay to rest, once and
for all, the myths surrounding the lack
of spreading computer virii on the
Macintosh OS X operating system, by
sponsoring a contest that challenges
virus writers to actually prove that
they can introduce a harmless virus
into two modern OS X Macs.
That was the goal of a contest
announced recently by DVForge, but,
due to a variety of influencing factors
was cancelled shortly after having been
announced.
A Statement About The Contest Cancellation
"In response to the statements put forth
this past week by Symantec Corporation
suggesting that Mac users are at
substantial risk to infections from viruses,
our company crafted and announced a contest
that would have paid a $25,000 prize for
the successful creation of such a virus,"
said Jack Campbell, DVForge, Inc. CEO,
"During the first several hours after making
the public announcement, I was contacted by
a large number of Mac users, and Mac software
professionals who shared their thinking with
me about the contest. A few of these people
are extremely well-regarded experts in the
field of Mac OS X security. So, I have taken
their advice very seriously, and have made
the difficult decision to cancel our contest.
I have been convinced that the risk of a virus
on the OS X platform is not zero, although it
is remarkably close to zero. More importantly,
I have been convinced that there may be legality
issues stemming from such a contest, beyond
those terminated by our own legal counsel,
prior to announcing the contest. So, despite
my personal distaste for what some companies
have done to take advantage of virus fears
among the Mac community, and my own inclination
to make a bold statement in response to those
fears, I have responsible choice but to retract
the contest, effective immediately."
DVForge, Inc. supports honesty and integrity by
manufacturers in all public communication. And,
we strongly discourage the use of exaggeration,
innuendo, or loosely stated claims in an effort
to increase sales of a company's products. We
believe in accurate, fair marketing statements,
and in allowing an accurately informed public to
then make its own decisions about purchasing,
or not purchasing, a company's products or
services. We implore all Mac industry businesses
to support these same values.
We do not endorse the creation or distribution
of computer viruses. U.S. and international law,
as well as simple good judgment forbid the
transmission of computer viruses.
I get no end of amusement from people claiming that Mac users buy Macs because "they don't know anything about computers," or something to that effect. The fact of the matter is, this particular Mac user sees his computer for what it is: an appliance. It's not a platform, a political party, or a religion. It's a machine, not entirely unlike a toaster or Cuisinart.
When choosing a computer, I took into consideration:
1) What I need it to do.
2) How I plan to interact with it.
3) How much effort I need to put into maintaining it.
3a) How much effort I need to put into making sure my machine stays mine (i.e. not compromised by some bored malcontent.)
So, over the course of several decades, I test-drove a few different machines, running different OSs (disclosure: I ran DOS and Windows variants up to and including XP, various Linux distributions, and Mac OS X.) It became glaringly obvious that OS X was far and away the OS of choice for the amount of time and effort I intend to invest in using and maintaing my computer.
I'm not a BSD advocate or a network security guru because, quite frankly, the subjects absolutely bore me to tears. However, even I can appreciate the simple, quiet wisdom of turning most networking services OFF on a fresh install of an OS (as does OS X.) Just think how much more secure our computing environment would be if people only enabled the services they absolutely needed.
If you contract and pay someone to kill someone else, you are held liable in their murder. I'd assume if you contract and pay someone to write a virus, you're liable for whatever computer crimes are broken as well.
If you offer a $25,000 prize to someone who writes a virus, you are contracting someone to write a virus, and I would very much expect you are liable to be charged with computer crimes even if the person who writes the virus is never caught.
If you look at the link, these people have cancelled their contest. But the offer was still made. I am not sure canceling the contest is enough to get them out of legal liability of having offered cash to break the law. If someone attempts a mac virus in the next month, or some other timeframe that would make it likely to be a response to this "contest", I wonder what will happen to them.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Which may or may not be do to Windows market share. It may also not have to do with any one factor. The problem I see is when Windows zealots use the market share argument exlusively to defend Windows.
I'm really trying to extract your point from your post and not having much success.
How is Classic MacOS and DOS less secure? DOS had zero internet connectivity out of the box. Even if you added a TCP/IP stack there were no services you were going to run on DOS. If you ran Windows 3.1 or something you could run Netscape I think. But then, here we are with Windows (actually, DOS) again with about the same market share as Windows has today and no rampent network exploit problem. So again, I'm not sure what your getting at.
The fact that Windows is exploted is proof that it is insecure. That is my point. Speculating that Linux or Mac would be just as insecure if they had the same market share is just speculation. It also ignores the possiblity that a system that was easier, or even as easy, to exploit as Windows but had a smaller market share might also be exploited. So the fact that Linux and Mac exploits are not a pandemic does not mean that they are just as insecure as Windows. It's not "fact-free hystrionics", it's just observation and logic.
Now if you think Linux is insecure because Windows is exploited maybe you can elaborate on why that is so I can better understand what your getting at. If on the other hand your arguing something else, please don't confuse it with my argument because you make me feel like you are'nt really paying attention to what I am saying.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
named Switchback which infected OSX Macs, but nobody noticed it.
There are others such as Renepo.B
MacOS MW2004 Trojan, MP3 Concept, Opener, and a sound driver virus.
I think clearly the only virus myth about OSX, is the myth that OSX has no viruses that can infect it. Apparently there are at least several examples of OSX viruses, and that number seems to grow. It may even double every year.
I've always felt that using a computer without virus protection was like having unprotected sex without a condom with multiple partners. Back in the old days, when they used to say that the Commodore Amiga had no viruses, and that only MS-DOS suffered from viruses, Amigas got their own viruses that infected their systems. Usually it was one of those Amiga demo programs that people downloaded from BBSes to show off the Amiga's graphics and sound. Someone would infect it with a virus and pass it around. Amiga users felt that the Amiga virus was a myth, and many got hit. Now I see the same thing happen for OSX, only OSX is on the Internet and is subject to more danagers than the BBS world once offered.
So yes, the facts speak for Symantec, that OSX viruses exist, and possibly they could grow in number.
This bone-headed stunt of offering a contest to virus infect two Macs only shows how gullable people are. It was a phoney contest.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
"Somebody would have to be incredibly naive to ignore all the warnings and still proceed."
Yes, and if ignorance really was bliss, the world would be one hell of a lot happier then it actually is.
I'm an IT consultant.
I've watched countless users sit there and click though endless dialogs warning them about how they're about to unleash bubonic plague upon the world or whatever. These people regard warnings as a hassle, something to be dismissed as quickly as possible. They do not regard them as an actual warning. Warnings are something that apply to other people.
If you change the default button to be the "safe" option, they click-and-close, try again and click-and-close, try again and click the other button and continue. They don't do this by reading the dialogs, they do this because if it didn't work the first two times they tried the first button, then it must be the other one.
If you require users to enter in "please destroy all my data" on the keyboard before running something, they will happily do that, to. While asking me why it asks them that.
If you require them to type a password, they'll type that in upon request, too. Look at how successful phishing scams are.
If all this fails to get some badware on the computer, users will seek out things like "Hotbar", "Gator", "Comet Cursor", "Bonzai Buddy", and so on, and try to install them.
People just don't want to have to think. That's the ultimate problem.
There's no doubt that the average MS-Windows system, as deployed, is hideously insecure. However, experience has shown me that even if you lock the system down well, users will still try and destroy it.
I've found the only way to keep users from compromising the security of their system is to remove their ability to do so. Then they just complain to me constantly that they cannot install all their badware. But then I can just tell them "Tough!".
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I hate to break it to you, but there's very little that Apple (or Mircosoft, or Linux, etc) can do to prevent many types of viruses, since they are installed by the user themselves. Think about a traditional virus that infects a binary and is run when the program is run. Or a trojan program that does bad things to your system. Good file permissions can prevent the spread of such viruses and limit their damage, but they aren't that hard to write. I've even seen prototypes for a shell script virus (in an educational setting, and non-destructive except for polluting your shell scripts). There's very little technically that anyone can do to prevent a shell script virus, at least not without making the system difficult to use (or radically redesigning the system, which will probably have other drawbacks).
Now, if you're talking about worms, yes most spread through security holes in the system, and those can be fixed. But there are many classes of malware where the security "hole" is the human doing work. And those are very hard, if not impossible to prevent.
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
*sigh*
I don't know why I bother with the tin-foil hat brigade, but it is an explicit terminatable offense at Symantec to write--or help in writing--a virus. They just clean out your desk and have security escort you out of the building that day, no appeal. Your stock options and stock purchase plan options are immediately revoked, you lose back vacation pay, and you get no severence. Just a bootprint on your ass as you're kicked out the door.
But of course I'm part of the conspiracy, so you'll probably think I'm either a dupe or a lying spokes-hole.
I like being part of conspiracies; I worked many years ago for JPL in the same building the Weekly World News claimed housed an alien spacecraft that was being studied by the military--and the tinfoil hat brigade didn't believe me then when I told them it was just so much hokem...
Wow, gone for a few minutes and you miss a lot.
Jack has been active lately. He is notorious in the Mac Community.
Everyone should read my article on his company and past in the Mac Community. It's called: Catch Me If You Can Part II: The True Story Behind MacMice
Make sure to also see the about section to gain clarity on who writes Jackwhispers and why.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Nice theory, but here's a few more points for you:
Postscript has been around two decades now, and AFAIK the only "virus" ever reported written it couldn't do anything but reset your Apple Laserwriter password. If you think you can write a Postscript program which reformats my hard drive, talks to my mail client, or even just brings up a dialogue box on my screen that says "Hi, I'm PostScript!", you're welcome to start hackin' now.
"A critical security update is needed for your $RANDOM_APP. The update has been downloaded. Installing update..."
[Password Dialog Here]
Or somesuch.
I think that's the sort of thing a security-minded expert would prefer, and the average user would be overwhelmed by. Yes, it would. I believe that Debian kinda-sorta does this with "fakeroot". I'd like an actual sandbox... Yup! I've been pondering the need for this sort of thing for awhile. If it's clean enough, and robust enough, you can run _all_ of your applications in their own sandboxes. I think that this approach is simple enough to work for both the average home user and powerful enough to make a security guru happy. Exactly. And if you want to keep the changes, you can put it in $HOME/.sandboxes/appname, or, since we're on the Mac, perhaps $HOME/Sandboxes/Appname/...I like the way you're thinking.
Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
NeXT figured out that this could potentially be a gigantic security hole and switched off file access from display postscript.