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Mac OS X Bitcoin Stealing Trojan Horse Called OSX/CoinThief Discovered
An anonymous reader writes "SecureMac.com has discovered a new trojan horse for Mac OS X called OSX/CoinThief.A, which spies on web traffic to steal Bitcoins. This malware has been found in the wild, along with numerous reports of stolen coins. The malware, which comes disguised as an app to send and receive payments on Bitcoin Stealth Addresses, instead covertly monitors all web traffic in order to steal login info for Bitcoin wallets."
There's no such thing as malware for Mac and there never has been.
This site used to be great. Even in it's latter days, it's been good. That is poised to change. Before long, it will be mediocre, and ordinary.
I didn't see a problem when Dice Holdings initially bought Slashdot. I figured there would be efforts to drive nerd traffic towards their job listings and such. That was fine. We all need jobs.
Things have changed now. Beyond the shifts in story choices, the slashvertisements, and so on, something fundamental has changed: Slashdot's owners do not appreciate it.
Their recent financials show that they have written its value as an asset down to zero. They have legally claimed it to be worthless. That is at the root of what is happening now. They want to fundamentally change the nature of this site in order to remake it into something with big growth potential.
Beta is just the latest symptom of this disease. It will not be the last. In striving to make it into a site that will bring them a growing user base and growing revenue per user, they have shown a willingness to dumb down the interface in the name of making it more accessible to newcomers, to cast aside essential elements of decade-spanning community culture, and to plow ahead with changes in the face of overwhelmingly negative user feedback.
This is not going to change. This will not go away. I will not support it.
I will be gone for this entire week, in protest. While away, I will work to create a new community where things can be run with quality user discussions as the paramount objective.
Be seeing you.
http://webchat.freenode.net/
#altslashdot
So, there's a man crawling through the desert.
He'd decided to try his SUV in a little bit of cross-country travel, had great fun zooming over the badlands and through the sand, got lost, hit a big rock, and then he couldn't get it started again. There were no cell phone towers anywhere near, so his cell phone was useless. He had no family, his parents had died a few years before in an auto accident, and his few friends had no idea he was out here.
He stayed with the car for a day or so, but his one bottle of water ran out
and he was getting thirsty. He thought maybe he knew the direction back, now that he'd paid attention to the sun and thought he'd figured out which way was north, so he decided to start walking. He figured he only had to go about 30 miles or so and he'd be back to the small town he'd gotten gas in last.
He thinks about walking at night to avoid the heat and sun, but based upon
how dark it actually was the night before, and given that he has no flashlight, he's afraid that he'll break a leg or step on a rattlesnake. So,
he puts on some sun block, puts the rest in his pocket for reapplication
later, brings an umbrella he'd had in the back of the SUV with him to give
him a little shade, pours the windshield wiper fluid into his water bottle
in case he gets that desperate, brings his pocket knife in case he finds a cactus that looks like it might have water in it, and heads out in the
direction he thinks is right.
He walks for the entire day. By the end of the day he's really thirsty. He's
been sweating all day, and his lips are starting to crack. He's reapplied the sunblock twice, and tried to stay under the umbrella, but he still feels sunburned. The windshield wiper fluid sloshing in the bottle in his pocket is really getting tempting now. He knows that it's mainly water and some ethanol and coloring, but he also knows that they add some kind of poison to it to keep people from drinking it. He wonders what the poison is, and
whether the poison would be worse than dying of thirst.
He pushes on, trying to get to that small town before dark.
By the end of the day he starts getting worried. He figures he's been walking at least 3 miles an hour, according to his watch for over 10 hours. That means that if his estimate was right that he should be close to the
town. But he doesn't recognize any of this. He had to cross a dry creek bed a mile or two back, and he doesn't remember coming through it in the SUV. He figures that maybe he got his direction off just a little and that the dry creek bed was just off to one side of his path. He tells himself that he's close, and that after dark he'll start seeing the town lights over one of these hills, and that'll be all he needs.
As it gets dim enough that he starts stumbling over small rocks and things,
he finds a spot and sits down to wait for full dark and the town lights.
Full dark comes before he knows it. He must have dozed off. He stands back
up and turns all the way around. He sees nothing but stars.
He wakes up the next morning feeling absolutely lousy. His eyes are gummy and his mouth and nose feel like they're full of sand. He so thirsty that he can't even swallow. He barely got any sleep because it was so cold. He'd forgotten how cold it got at night in the desert and hadn't noticed it the night before because he'd been in his car.
He knows the Rule of Threes - three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food - then you die. Some people can make it a little longer, in the best situations. But the desert heat and having to walk and sweat isn't the best situation to be without water. He figures, unless he finds water, this is his last day.
He rinses his mouth out with a little of the windshield wiper fluid. He waits a while after spitting that little bit out, to see if his mouth goes numb, or he feels dizzy or something. Has his mouth gone numb? Is it just in
his mind? He's not sure. He'll go a little farther, and if he stil
Beware Dice malware named Beta
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
The incremental improvement concept is a dead horse. As the saying goes: "can't polish a turd". I'm out for the week. Boycott in effect. Shame on you, a bunch of fuckers all so say I.
Oh that's right, so much Beta talk the mods deleted it. What a joke.
RIP Slashdot. Mods better spruce up their resume, though killing a major site like Slashdot won't look good on the job market, now will it?
Not a single camel fucking scene.
Everyone has known forever you can have malware on a Mac. That's hardly a surprise.
But malware is more limited on a Mac than other systems - for one thing no users run as admin as they do on Windows.
Also with Mavericks gatekeeper would preset you with a nice juicy dialog preventing you from running this untrusted and unsigned malware. You would have to take several steps of your own volition to run it at all...
You Mac haters are saying you don't want the Mac to turn into iOS. Well which is it? Let users run unapproved software after several "Are you sure" kinds of stopping points? Or only allow signed binaries on the system?
Make up your mind.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
MOD DOWN FLAMEBAIT
I remember when Slashdot was full of intelligent people ... but it's been shit since, I don't know, 2000.
And yes I used to have an account. Anyway, they want to screw up the software? Who cares, you bunch screwed up the content long enough ago for children to be born and have adult teeth!
Fuck beta /thread
Brilliant!
OK, I'm assuming here that the app is unsigned. Its interesting that reporters at security news sites don't seem to care.
The obvious way to corner the bitcoin "market" now is distributed malware to "mine" the coins instead of stealing them.
Please use meta.apple-beta.slashdot.org to discuss slashdot beta, not the main. Meta comments are very welcome there. Thanks !
And by the way, there is nothing wrong with beta. Works perfectly on my iPad Air !
Any of the big exchanges (and most of the medium sized ones) offer two step authentication. If someone is storing coins online, whether at an exchange or in an online wallet, then two step auth is mandatory.
Seeing how sites can vanish overnight I wouldn't advise using an online wallet anyway. Keep a personal encrypted wallet, and only move coins on to exchanges long enough to do transactions.
Off for a week, Fuck Beta, Fuck Dice, altslashdot for the win.
Wait... OSX?
That statement doesn't make sense. It implies that the "haters" think that Mac OS X is a good thing.
Mac haters use any possible excuse why they do not run a Mac, and that is one of them (they claim it is "turning into iOS" when plainly that is not the case).
Also as the other responder noted, the traditional Apple Hater is short of reason as it is so you attempt to apply logic to behavior is dubious at best.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Isn't that a bit of a giveaway, if you write a Trojan and call it OSX/CoinThief? I know there are people out there who think people buying Macs do so because they are too stupid to handle real computers, but nobody could possibly think they are stupid enough to install an app called OSX/CoinThief? Is that how the trojan was found? Someone thought the name is a bit suspicious and started looking?
For a moment I thought we were talking about MONEY!
Whilst I, like every else here, seem to hate the changes being made here, are all the people here who post complaints here totally IT incapable?
If anyone here reads /. using firefox, it doesn't take a huge degree of effort to edit the HTML 'on the fly', and strip out all the offensive code. Has anyone looked at the RSS feed lately? It is abominable!
SOLUTION: Install Stylish, and voila. Complete control to throw away all the crap.
We probably should set up a community-driven recipe that everyone can download without the hassle of writing their own recipe. I *might* try to get round to doing this in a day or so... No promises, though.
...only better.
Uh-huh. Sure.
Yes, as we all well know, bitcoins are worthless and so therefore nobody would ever steal them and so therefore this whole article is a lie from Satan.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
please don't come back!
Ulysses come back with my bits!
Macs let you sudo any time an application requests
Some things will not launch at all unless you disable, or work around gatekeeper. If I download an unsigned executable I cannot just run it, I have to right-click and select open to force Gatekeeper to run it. That's a pretty good default level of security.
Then after that point - yes an application can request further access, but it's a pretty glaring thing to pull up the password prompt. Even non technical users would think a little about why that was happening.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A few misguided or otherwise benighted induhviduals who believe Bitcoin is money doesn't make it so.
"Do you mean WinXP or Win8?"
Yes.