Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
I didn't realize Kane & Lynch had been announced for the Mac platform
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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.
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?
Write Once, Piss People Off Everywhere?
"I visited the macsweeper.com website. I know I probably shouldn't have but I used a Mac so I knew I wouldn't get infected."
...
oh wait
+1 fashionably cynical
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't take special permissions to put stuff in ~/Applications. It's not done by default, but some users do do it, and Finder supports it.
.Apps don't need an installer, nor need to be in /Applications.
Or heck, just put it on the desktop where the user can click it. No special permissions needed. Most
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...
There are now 10 or more Mac users?
I thought Symantec released the first Scareware for Macs?
Looks like they read slashdot. Their "Contact Us" page is already edited now to remove the text copied from Symantec. Now the page doesn't say much of anything at all. No phone numbers, no addresses. Just a bare e-mail address. Hard to believe how scam artists can operate out in the open these days.
I'd prefer to focus on the ZERO self propagating pieces of malware in the wild.
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
No, it has a couple of advantages.
/" as a normal user, you would only lose the files you had access to and not break the system.
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
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
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...
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!
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.
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
Oh, and you mis-spelled "purchase" in two methods in MacSweeperDaemon.
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.