Apple Quietly Goes After Mac Trojan With Update

Th'Inquisitor was one of several readers to point out coverage of Apple's stealth security fix, included along with the recent Snow Leopard 10.6.4 update. Graham Cluley of Sophos first noticed the update to protect Mac computers from a Trojan, and the fact that Apple didn't mention it in the release notes. The malware opens a back door to a Mac that can allow attackers to gain control of the machine and snoop about on it or turn it into a zombie. "You have to wonder," writes Cluley, "whether their keeping quiet about an anti-malware security update like this was for marketing reasons." While he certainly has a point that Apple benefits by its users' belief that the platform is secure, you also have to wonder whether any such publicity from a security company has a marketing subtext, as well.

Comments

Re:You have to wonder?

[grapes911]

trojan != virus

this is anything but new

[v1]

There's been malware out for mac for well over a year. The big one I run into is a self-decoding shell script that installs a root cronjob to redirect your dns servers. The machines get brought into me because their web browsing has gotten slower, due to the malware dns server the machine is now using being a lot slower than their ISP's.

I've actually ran into ONE example of a mac that was back-door'd, but thought it was an isolated targeted attack. (the victim was "high profile") But maybe it was just an early version of what's discussed in this thread.

BUT, tossing my hat into the ring as to whether or not Apple should be "hiding" the fix... check out the latest security update from Apple. HUGE list of security patches. (over 40?) All with accreditation to the people that brought the issues to Apple. It's not like they don't have issues, and it's not like they systematically hide them. They just tend to fix them very quickly, and have very few (relatively speaking) to fix in the first place. Apple is well-known to include security updates and fixes in their OS updates, they don't all land in security updates. That's all this one was. It's very likely there were a dozen other security-related fixes made in the 10.6.4 update. This one they just happened to notice. Apple just doesn't usually put a security-fix accreditation readme in with their OS updates. Is that the real issue here I wonder?

Re:Trojan for Mac had to appear some day...

[cbhacking]

Part of writing serious malware, the sort that uses shellcodes and relies upon particular calling conventions and memory layouts, is very platform-specific. That kind of thing has to be learned anew for every platform one wants to target, often including different architectures of a given OS.

Trojans, on the other hand, are literally nothing other than programs that the user doesn't realize he is installing. They may attempt to hide themselves using platform-specific tricks, but at the end of the day, it's a program written like any other. OS X may emphasize Objective-C and de-emphasize its UNIX underpinnings for many things, but at the end of the day it uses a POSIX API very similar to the one found in Linux.

Hell, I've written software for the POSIX subsystem of NT on x86, and successfully ported it to Linux on ARM, with fewer than one #ifdef per KLOC. I strongly suspect that OS X is a lot closer to Linux than SUA (Microsoft's NT Subsystem for UNIX Applications) is to Linux, yet it wasn't hard at all. It wasn't malware, but if I'd wanted to I could have invisibly slipped it into an installer for some other program and then it would have been a trojan.