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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."

4 of 301 comments (clear)

  1. Isn't any "cleaning tool" rogue on a mac? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The category of "cleaning tools" was rather dodgy even before the trojaned ones started showing up. The notion that getting infected by god knows what, running a little wizard, and being all ok again is insane. Both the notion that one can reliably detect malware that has already had time to romp with your system and the idea that infection is so routine that there should be tools to be run every few days for it are pretty gross.

    And now we have an example of this fine species showing up on a platform that doesn't really have malware. How could anybody trust a cleaner for a platform that doesn't, as yet, need cleaning?

  2. Re:Oh no! by webmaster404 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    No, it has a couple of advantages.

    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.

    2. Most software is installed through a repository. Now, I realize that Mac does not by default (although there are projects to port apt-get and the like to it) but most distros of Linux have a way of installing via the repository.

    3. Most first-party OS-X software is at least partly open-source including the key components of the OS such as the Kernel, Browser rendering engine, and some of the other utilities. This adds a layer of protection to prevent programming errors from not being noticed as anyone can look at the code and submit fixes to it. In addition, this adds security by having parts of Safari being looked at to prevent such flaws as drive-by-downloads which were a major problem of IE and a reason many Windows users got infected by malware.

    While it is true that if someone really wanted to mess up OS-X or were just plain stupid they could. However, the chances of Unix breaking from normal usage are far far smaller then those of Windows.

    --
    There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
  3. Re:Oh no! by Architect_sasyr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    While it is true that if someone really wanted to mess up OS-X or were just plain stupid they could. However, the chances of Unix breaking from normal usage are far far smaller then those of Windows.
    You need to meet some of my designers. I spend more time rebuilding OS X machines and correcting privileges than I do with the windows users... incidentally this never happened on the OS 9 installs, so the additional power that having a Unix system around can give is actually what is causing me and my users the most grief here.

    Your comments on OS code, whilst quite valid, are actually rather incorrect. Something that a lot of people seem to fail to remember with open source code is that the code IS available IF you wish to look at it. Personally I've never gone near the Kernel code, so I wouldn't have a clue if it is secure or not (perfect example of this: Firefox).

    My $0.02 AU, Ignore at will.
    --
    Me failed English...
    FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
  4. Hi i'm MacSweeper Developer, listen to me by MacSweeper · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I would like to explain all the situation, about MacSweeper. We are really trying to make a good software, and you wont find any viruses/spyware/trojans/malware in MacSweeper (test it your self, if you don't believe me, you can use any type of firewalls, dissemblers, or other tools) . The problem is that we are using selling partners that forces us to use this marketing type. We would like to leave them, we don't want to completely destroy Good Name of MacSweeper application.
    Personally I adore Mac Platform, and it hearts to here that the program you wrote is said to be some kind of "Rogue application" , i wouldn't like to destroy good manners of software written for it :((
    I would like to say sorry for all inconveniences that we could bring to you, but believe MacSweeper is meant to be a useful application.

    You can ask Questions, and i will try to answer them! Thank You!