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First Scareware For the Mac
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."
The journalist should have visited using a linux livecd. If the site hosts mac malware then it is a pretty good bet they already have established "businesses" in the field of windows malware.
What, you need to download something to your mac and then INSTALL it?
This kind software has be there long time ago and there is nothing new to see here.
Market share is still smaller than GNU/Linux and it is not having this kind problems, wait, it has.
Come back again when F-secure and others have proof for worm or virus what works like windows platform, automatically.
common as Macs continue to grow in popularity. Malicious code tends to gravitate towards the largest user base (more targets), and Apple's market share (or perhaps, more importantly, positive PR) is growing at a decent rate. I'm surprised that it hasn't happened sooner.
The same could happen to Linux, (Free|Open|Net)BSD, etc. All it takes is an uneducated* user behind the console, and Linux's drive to take on the desktop makes that all the more likely.
* I mean uneducated in the security sense. You can be highly intelligent, have 3 PhD's, and still not know a thing about what downloads to avoid. We can't know everything about everything, after all.
The wise follow a damned path, for to know is to be forsaken.
Well, assuming Apple's market share is increasing (which I don't know for sure, just taking it as a given for making my point), some significant fraction of those new Mac owners are former PC owners. Many of these people will assume that all the crapware they "needed" for their Windows machine is just part of owning a computer. It's not that there's a problem with a Mac, it's that a lot of people just don't know any better.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
But the Applications folder does not run as root, but as the regular user. The malware can only screw up the current users session, it cannot access or modify anything that needs root permissions without asking for the root password. Without root, malware is annoying, but not difficult to get rid of.
Yes, but if you ask a user what they care more about - the OS or their data - you'll find few who care that they'll have to reinstall the OS. It's an irritant, but easily replaced from the source media.
Our data is far more critical, making the ~/Applications folder (or the ~/Desktop folder) a dangerous place for executables.
Of course, in these enlightened days we all have regular backups now or Time-Machine-enabled external drives. Hmm...
I'm sure people care more about the contents of their /bin folder (or whatever passes for that in OS X) than the graduation pictures of their kids and their tax returns. So I guess that's OK. The OS was never compromised! Incidentally, you don't need root to turn a machine into a spam-spewing zombie. On any OS.
it cannot access or modify anything that needs root permissions without asking for the root password.
Well then, it will just ask for the root password. You're thinking here that the user won't provide it for some reason? They just clicked on a "Punch the monkey" banner, after all.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
I'd prefer to focus on the ZERO self propagating pieces of malware in the wild.
Don't forget to focus on the MANY pieces of common third-party software you won't be able to run in your malware-free haven, or the number of third-party products where the performance of your machine will go to waste because there was no point the third party writing up-to-date, optimized drivers and utilities on a platform used by a tiny fraction of their userbase.
- User Data: not protected
- System Data: not protected
OS X:- User Data: not protected
- System Data: protected
Ok, sure, OS X is not perfectly safe. Clearly it is the better choice though in terms of protecting system data. I really only made this reply because some of these posts (not necessarily the one I'm replying to) seem to be implying the OS X is somehow less safe. At worst it's no more secure than Windows; at best it is significantly more so.Protecting system data may not be the most important thing in computing, but it's a bit ridiculous to claim it's less important than user data. You're probably right: the affected Joe User probably cares a lot more about his photos that he's procrastinated on backing up for the last 3 years than whether or not his OS is functional. However, I'm pretty sure that the other users on that PC are very glad that they weren't affected by Joe's actions. And let's be realistic here: how often does a piece of malware destroy files wholesale? Save the occasional virus writer that hates the world, most malware creators are much more interested in profit (i.e. getting users to buy something, typically through inserting advertisements).
Doesn't matter. Stupid users trump all possible security measures (except locking them out of the system for their own good, which isn't really feasible), and there's no shortage of them. Until the programmers can prevent stupid users from infecting their systems, it doesn't matter how damn many malware samples there are in the wild, and you have no right to be smug about the security of your OS.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Most companies that can only maintain a small percentage of the market place fold. I suspect that the reason Mac hasn't is due to the exceedingly large size and growth of the consumer PC business.
If you're making a profit it doesn't matter how many customers you have: you're still in the black. Sure, more customers then means more profit, but usually you hit a wall where you have to cut profits in order to stay competitive. If a company is happy with its single digit market share (what most would call a niche) then there's no reason to change anything. If you look at Apple's products (especially their audio division), I imagine they have a significantly higher average profit margin than somebody like Dell.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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As a linux user, I am under no delusion that my system is "more secure" than a windows box or a mac.
For me, the worst thing that can possibly happen, is somebody destroys my home directory. Ok, that's easy, if a virus is logged in as me. If they hose my system, so what? I can always re-install linux, that isn't a problem. There aren't any other users. I allow myself access to the internet and to email, so if a virus starts spamming the world, well, that isn't stopped by security policy either.
What you're talking about is a linux server. There, it's hard to root the machine and cross-infect, sure. But what spreads viruses the most these days is users downloading shit in email and not knowing that their browser just executed something. Linux is *not* more secure. *I* am a user am less prone to viruses because I maintain a strict policy of which sites I use each browser for, where I take cookies from, and I browse sketchy shit only inside vmware and restore from a clean image frequently. But I'm still vulnerable to all sorts of attacks -- if google pushes an ad with linux-targeted malware, for example.
If you think linux is somehow inherently virus-proof, you're deluding yourself. Using linux on the desktop is the same as using any other desktop system -- if somebody else knows how to make an executable for your system, it's probably vulnerable.
Which is ironic, because just as you should still lock your car doors in the suburbs, the principle of defense in depth is just as applicable to any *nix-based OS as it is to Windows.
Both switchers are getting exactly the wrong impression.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Almost every techie I've ever met who makes a broad statement like "(Linux|OS X) is way more secure than Windows" has been so security-retarded it's not even funny. I've used Linux exclusively for years but I'm under no delusions that any general-purpose execution environment is malware-proof. I used to run Win98 and Win2k without anti-virus or firewall and I only got a single virus in 6 years because I opened an exe sent to me by a friend. On my Linux box, anything worth doing can be done as me: stealing personal information, sniffing passwords and credit card numbers, running a botnet client or a daemon on a non-privileged port. I've also got SSH keys that grant me access to my own dedicated boxes, as well as dozens of my employer's servers, not to mention the source code to proprietary applications worth millions. What makes Linux safer is that most people aren't writing trojans for Linux. It's almost sad to watch the Mac market grow like it is, knowing what it will rain down on the smug little bastards. I've got nothing against Mac users, but at this point their hubris is almost Titanic in its proportions. Additionally, Linux has a steeper learning curve than Windows or Mac OS X, meaning most users are more likely to be aware of proper security concepts. Still, I've found rootkits on the servers of many *nix sysadmins. Oh, and they all believed Linux was "way more secure" than Windows.
I have come here to chew memory and kick ass... and malloc() is returning a null pointer.
As a desktop user I severely disagree, I'd rather lose everything but ~ and if I'm stupid enough to run malware that malware will have the necessary permissions to delete everything I care about.
And about opensource being better because people can look at it and find vulnerabilities. Have you ever looked at the Mozilla code? Lots of people have and yet regularly there are new exploits found, some that have been there since the browser was called Mozilla.
I monitor a few open source applications mailing lists and often when a security vulnerability is found, it has been there a long time. How many more are lurking in that mess of C++ code?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Stupid, meet journalist, your brother.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Obviously nothing's ever for sure, especially not with your computers. But if your browser isn't running with elevated privileges, then you don't need to worry about malware coming in through it the way people with WinXP + IE6 do, save for any specific & isolated exploits. So I would argue that linux is more secure (if by linux we mean "your average linux distro") because your average distro is going to install software from a trusted repo, not have a default install that leaves you running your browser as root every day, and will also give you the tools to control your network interface. And even if you don't use those tools, the fact that 9/10 of the linux users out there do use them does in fact make you a little safer. It gets better...the myriad differences in distros, software packaging, and choice of software means that any "linux" exploit is not going to affect all linux users, unless it's at the kernel level, and even then, there's plenty of variation in people's kernels. Safety in numbers, I guess.
What the hell are you talking about?
Oh dear LORD if this app will be deleting files in such a manner you will break SO MANY things. Just do the honorable thing, pull it before it does serious damage.
...here is why: