Two Trojans For Mac OS X

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday June 24, 2008 @07:31PM from the knock-knock-who's-there-trojan dept.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "F-Secure is reporting that there are two new Mac OS X trojans. The first is just a proof-of-concept from the MacShadows people that takes advantage of the unpatched ARDAgent vulnerability to get root access when run by the user. The second relies on social engineering: it's a poker game that requests the user's password, claiming to have detected a 'corrupt preference file.' It then takes control of the computer. Now that the source of the proof-of-concept is publicly available, we can expect that future trojans won't just politely request your password."

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Re:An unpopular opinion.... by John+Betonschaar · 2008-06-24 21:52 · Score: 1, Redundant

I don't really see the difference between OS X privilege escalation using a password prompt and sudo or Vista using UAC. If you allow the program admin privileges you're screwed, and I believe it's just as easy to implement this on Vista as it is on OS X. On linux it might be a little bit harder because different distro's use different sudo configurations.
As for the ARDAgent vulnerability: that's a completely different story, it's a serious security flaw that needs to be fixed very, very fast.