Christian Heilmann

Two Viruses for Macs – does this mean we cannot be smug any longer?

Sunday, February 19th, 2006 at 1:14 am

Security Pro News reported about two Viruses spreading on Macs. While one of them is not yet found in the wild and spreads via Bluetooth, the other one is around, but needs a daft user like most of the less subtle PC Viruses.

Leap.A spreads itself via iChat and originally claimed to be screenshots of Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard with the name latestpics.tgz.

I blame two reasons for Mac Viruses emerging:

  • The switch to intel, thus making it easier to check the system
  • The smugness of a lot of Mac Users about being Virus-free for life. Yes, OS X is UNIX based, but it has hooks *nix hasn’t got – like iChat.

Don’t trust anything you don’t know is the Motto, and it might be a good idea to use the console from time to time to know what all these funky icons really are under the hood.

Update

The lovely Veerle quantifies the information as malicious software and not a Virus, and she has a point. As stated, it needs an uninformed user to execute it and it is not dormant in your system to become active at a certain date.

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