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First Scareware For the Mac

Posted by kdawson on from the rogue-cleaning-tool dept.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property sends us news from F-Secure of what they claim is the first rogue cleaning tool for the Mac. MacSweeper is a Mac version of Cleanator, hosted from a colo somewhere in the Ukraine. The article points out that the company's About page is lifted verbatim from Symantec's site. With the Mac's market share closing in on double digits, perhaps it's not surprising to see the platform targeted with crapware as PCs have been for years. The F-Secure author adds as a footnote that a journalist said to him something you don't hear every day: "I visited the macsweeper.com website. I know I probably shouldn't have but I used a Windows PC so I knew I wouldn't get infected."

3 of 301 comments (clear)

  1. Re:the shit hits the fan! by necro2607 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yeah the difference is, you can't get spyware installed on a Mac by clicking a banner ad in a browser. The software doesn't even have permission to do software installation, so it would be asking for a password (unless some unknown vulnerability is exploited). Frankly if you're entering your password for your computer when some arbitrary website asks for it, you've already got have way worse problems than spyware on your Mac.

  2. Re:Yeah and moon is made from.. by willyhill · · Score: 5, Informative
    Come back again when you understand how Windows machines are largely compromised. Crapware vendors don't need to wait for the next IE vulnerability to target people, all they need is social engineering and lack of common sense. The last few major botnet herding attacks have been perpetrated like that. The fastest-spreading worms have been perpetrated like that. Coming a close second is exploiting vulnerabilities that people can't be bothered to patch. Yet all of this has somehow become Microsoft's fault, but in this case I guess it's the user's fault, right?

    Idiocy can and will spread happily across platform boundaries. It really does not matter what OS you are using. And this article proves it. It's just that until now Windows was losing by the weight of sheer numbers. It has more vulnerabilities, sure. But those are irrelevant to the people who make big $$$ compromising machines. They simply don't need them.

    --
    The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
  3. Re:Hi i'm MacSweeper Developer by ncryptd · · Score: 5, Informative
    Well... a quick disasm of your binary doesn't show anything blatantly malicious, which is good... but I also don't see anything really useful. Pretty much everything your program does (and much, much more) can be done with OnyX. For free.

    Oh, and you mis-spelled "purchase" in two methods in MacSweeperDaemon. ;-)

    (void) purchaise
    (void) purchaiseThread
    I also noticed you left a somewhat interesting TODO list in the app bundle.

    The binaries have references to KIVViSoftware throughout them -- you wouldn't happen to be one and the same with these guys, would you?

    Disclaimer: I didn't find anything blatantly malicious -- but I only took a quick look. Given the folders that it tinkers around with, any bugs could do some damage to your Mac, so be careful.