Mac Trojen Discovered in the Wild
November 5th, 2007 Posted in Technology
Our days of worry free computing may shortly be history. Many people have asked me what they can do so they don’t have to worry about all the spyware and viruses. The easy answer has always been, “get a mac!” But now, with the discovery of a trojen in the wild targeted at apple computers, I may shortly have to alter my answer.
The trojen, titled OSX.RSPlug.A, changes the system’s DNS settings with the intent of hijacking web-browsing. The trojen was first reported by Intego. According to their security alert,
The Trojan horse also installs a root crontab which checks every minute to ensure that its DNS server is still active. Since changing a network location could change the DNS server, this cron job ensures that, in such a case, the malicious DNS server remains the active server.
Well, that’s impressive. It will never cease to amaze me at the amount of effort people will put into destructive means. But with the increasing popularity of the new iMacs, it was sure to happen. Our sanity was to be encroached upon. Our life of apple bliss was sure to be soured by someone…
So as a good practice, do not download and install software from untrusted locations, no matter what movies they say you can watch. In fact, just don’t click it, don’t download it, don’t trust it, unless you know where it’s coming from.