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."

Comments

Not the smartest journo

[MLCT]

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.

Yeah and moon is made from..

[Fri13]

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.

Re:Yeah and moon is made from..

[postbigbang]

Your comment is somewhat disingenuous. For argument sake you can cite that there are probably an equal number of stupid people buying Macs and PCs, by percentage.

Now take a look at the architectures. A dozen years of Windows since Win95 has only progressively made Windows more secure, and while better than before, still full of a superfluity of exploits (for differing reasons, again, not counting user "stupidity"). You have to do a lot of work to iteratively get past the gatekeepers in both operating systems; it's not as trivial an exercise as it once was; all the really wide-open machines are 0w3d by someone by now.... as part of a botnet.

Given a 5-10% of the market for Apple, depending on whom you believe, you're only now seeing a MacOS ruse. Think about that for a moment. Think about both motive and opportunity. Motive we understand. Opportunity hasn't been very strong until now. The weapon? Two decades in to desktop operating systems (three if you count CP/M, UCSD Pascal and so on) we're only now seeing a MacOS exploit. A common denominator among the exploitable: stupidity. Now let's scratch off stupidity and talk about architecture. It's not Microsoft's fault that they used a root-level database (the 'Registry') that could be twigged by any user-mode app in pre-XP SP2? Hmmmm. Or the mindless ways that people found to explode IE? Or the TCP/IP stack? Or how long it took to get a WEP-128 parser and still longer for a WPA parser? Microsoft's sloppy code created an industry, one to fix the code, and another to exploit it. They didn't take security seriously, then paid it only lipservice. They're paying the price in disrespect for not being respectable!

Re:Wait, why would you even use this?

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

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.

Re:the shit hits the fan!

[jmauro]

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.

Re:the shit hits the fan!

[GaryPatterson]

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...

Re:Oh no!

[Tsiangkun]

I'd prefer to focus on the ZERO self propagating pieces of malware in the wild.

Re:Oh no!

[bigstrat2003]

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.

Re:Oh no!

[Garridan]

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.

Re:Oh no!

[dryeo]

1. Privileges, an ordinary user can't mess up the entire system. Unless the user is *really* stupid, they are not root and therefore do not have Write privileges on system-critical files. So even if you ran "rm -rf /" as a normal user, you would only lose the files you had access to and not break the system. So you figure it is better to only lose your home directory containing everything you care about, email, pictures, personal documents, all your settings like bookmarks etc. As long as the rest of the system, which is easy as hell to reinstall, is not compromised?
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?