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:Oh no!

[Tsiangkun]

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

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?