Mac OS X targeted by virus

[Taxman]

Trojan Horse Attacks Mac OS X

Thanks to Apple Computer's rising star in the world of digital music, Mac OS X has become a target for malware authors.

A Trojan horse, called MP3Concept or MP3Virus.gen, has been discovered that masquerades as an MP3 file. It hides in ID tags of the file and becomes activated when unwary users click on it, expecting to play a digital song.

"This is the first native Mac OS virus we've found," said Brian Davis, U.S. sales manager for Intego, a Mac security and privacy firm that discovered the Trojan.

The Trojan is benign, according to Intego. If launched, it doesn't do anything except access files in the System folder. But Intego warned that the code could be modified easily to delete files or hijack a machine and replicate itself through e-mail.

"This is likely a test Trojan showing these things are possible," said Davis. "There's definitely an open door we don't want to leave open."

- continued

Not good news, folks...

[reagan_youth]

Wanna bet that Steve Jobs has already got the patch ready to download to my computer on Tuesday?
One thing about Apple, there WILL be a security update soon and it will close the door.
Now, I view a virus as I view sex with strangers. Don't go a whorin around and you won't get nuthin.
As long as I give my 99 cents to Apple to download my songs I am completely safe. Limewire and "free" downloads are a different matter.
Thanks for the heads up Taxman.

r_y

[TXNavy]

There probably will be, just because its a simple virus with a simple scope. Microsoft, for what its worth, is very fast with patches. The problem is that some patches are going to be more complex and take more time than others. Apples are not immune to viruses or "safer" than PC's - its just that they have a far, far smaller market share so hackers don't waste time with them.

Being Unix-based (its not, so far as I know, a licensed Unix but I may be wrong) doesn't make it inherently safer. Windows is Unix-based, just not POSIX compliant, or really anything compliant in general. I don't know of any OS that doesn't have its roots in Unix. SunOS is the "safest" Unix just because it used to be the most widely used, and Cray's used to be the worst because they were rarely targetted and normally not exposed to the internet directly, but I have no idea what the status quo is today. Linux is probably the absolute safest thing out there right now, just because of the N variations out there.

Anyway, just babbling away here...