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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.