Antivirus vendors Intego systems are reporting on their website of a new variant of the old Trojan Horse exploit this time named OSX.RSPlug.D
What is significant here? The first three letters of the name. OSX of course is the Macintosh operating system from Apple. The same system which many Mac aficionados purport to be superior to other operating systems because of it’s inherant ‘invulnerability’ to exploits despite there being evidence to the contrary (Month of Apple Bugs). Mac users still brazenly operate online without the most basic of anti-malware systems in place, by choice. Misleading advertising by Apple doesn’t help of course.
This latest threat does however seem to rely on the user visiting dodgy pornography sites (although it could work on any video site) and being tricked in to downloading and installing a ‘codec’ to watch their chosen distraction.
As is their right, Itego claim that ‘The best way to protect against this exploit is to run Intego VirusBarrier X5′.Unfortunately they are probably right. Mac users have been trained to believe their systems are invulnerable and of course it was only a matter of time before the bad guys cottoned on to this. Even though this is not the first trojan for macs, we are now surely at a point where there needs to be some serious back-peddling on the part of Apple and all the mac evangilists out there.
Lets not forget too that fame is not the motivator for the crims that are writing this stuff. You get more money for exploits which work because they are not yet patched. So just because there isn’t a huge list of Mac viruses out there, that doesn’t mean Macs are immune.
The Mac community needs to learn, like the windows community is, that we are all responsible for the security of our own devices. To be secure we need to learn to smell a rat, and when a clever trickster does get the better of us a bit of anti-malware running in the background might just save our skins.
