http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/22/first.mac.botnet/index.html "Mac users at large, however, should not be alarmed by the incident, experts said. The program infects only computers whose users downloaded pirated versions of the Mac software iWork. The harmful software is a Trojan horse, meaning it tries to sneak into the computer with some sort of permission from the user. Computer worms travel differently. They wiggle their way into computers and replicate without the owner's approval or knowledge."
So Macs were immune to viruses until now not because they're technically brilliant, but because no one cared about them? lol
This is old news. The trojan comes back with a pirated copy of iWork. Running the malicious software involves double clicking something then entering your administrator password. I'd hardly call that a failure of the OSX security model as much as it's just a failure of software pirates using their brains.
Not really, there has been malicious software and shell scripts in the past. They all require you to download them, execute them, and then type in your password though. If you use genuine software instead of things like adobe_photoshop_crack.app, you'll never have any issue.
This is not the first of it's kind. Fortunately, infecting your machine involves typing an administrator password. Who would do such a thing? Well, let's just say, it takes a certain breed.
Pretty much. Anything you ever do in OSX that requires super user access which usually has to do with decrypting things, allowing access to passwords, or writing/modifying files outside of your user directory gives you a prompt like this- It tells you what it's trying to access and what program is prompting you for that access. If britney_spears.jpg.app is trying to get outside of your home directory and requests super user access, you would think this would raise suspicion in most people and they wouldn't enter their password. The OSX security model is only as good as the user who is using it, so if you're the kind of person who doesn't read anything, has a blank password, and just hits enter whenever a prompt comes up... It's really hard to feel sorry when your system gets rooted.
Yeah don't know why so many people were downloading the torrent for that program anyway Download Apples (guaranteed) version of the demo they hand out for free, and torrent a serial number to enter into the Apple demo. No viruses.
