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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."
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?
"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.
There are now 10 or more Mac users?
I thought Symantec released the first Scareware for Macs?
I'd prefer to focus on the ZERO self propagating pieces of malware in the wild.
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.