Ready For the Big Mac Virus?

An anonymous reader writes "The IT security manager of the University of Otago, New Zealand, has been educating his OS X users in security best-practices. According to Mark Borrie, many Mac users believe they were immune to security problems -- a trap many Mac fans seem to have fallen into. He said around 40 percent of the computers at the uni are Macs. "On the security side of things I reckon the Mac community has yet to wake up to security. They think they are immune and typically have this idea that they can do whatever they want on their Macintosh and run what they like," said Borrie. "If I can get our Mac users up to speed and say 'you are not immune' -- so when [the malware] hits, hopefully we will be pretty safe," he said. "We want to be ready for the first big Macintosh virus -- because it will come. Some day, somebody will say 'I am going to create a headline and write a virus for Mac'," said Borrie."

Comments

Trojan executables on OS X

[ThreeDayMonk]

The Mac interface *will not* execute even files that are marked as executable! It will only execute .APP directories, which means that the attacker would need to pack the app into a DMG file, then somehow convince the user to extract and run the file. None of this "mydoc.doc .pif" crap.

Not strictly true. You can do a "mydoc.doc.pif"-style trick on OS X.

I have made a proof-of-concept trojan horse that appears to be a JPEG file, opens a JPEG in Preview, and to the layman appears to be a JPEG file. In fact, it's an Application in the form of a .app directory.

OS X is smart enough to realise that an app called "foo.jpeg.app" is nefarious, and displays its full name. If, however, the first period is replaced with a similar-looking Unicode punctuation character, the OS displays just "foo.jpeg". With a suitable application icon, it looks a lot like a genuine image. (The only obvious difference is the absence of size information under the filename, but I think most people wouldn't notice that.)

Admittedly, you still have to package it as a .dmg or .zip, so it's not as gaping a vulnerability as on Windows.