Do you know a Mac fan? I’m sure you do, and if you don’t they are easy to spot. They tend to be the ones who extol the virtues of their OS rather than empathize with you when you think your PC is a conduit for knob pill emails, and DDoS attacks.
However, the recent proliferation of Macs has made the “Worlds most advanced OS” a bit more of a target. The Tored Mac worm has joined the drip drip of Mac viruses that are starting to rear their heads. Tored is a worm designed to harvest email addresses from an infected computer, and send itself to those same email addresses. And it would have got away with it to, if it hadn’t been for those crap virus writers.
According to security firm Sophos, the code is written so badly that its a bit of a surprise it ever made it out in to the wild. At least they are polite. Not wanting to offend the Linux and Windows users of the world they included this sentence:
For Mac OS X ! :(If you are not on Mac please transfer this mail to a Mac and sorry for our fault :)
What’s the betting they bought a paving stone in a posh box?
So Mac users can rest assured then? Of course not. As mentioned before this is just an example of a Mac virus, a bad one, but one of a growing number. OSX.Trojan.iServices.A and OSX.Trojan.iServices.B were discovered back in January, and are currently doing the rounds. The truth is Mac has the same potential for security flaws as any OS, and as the market share grows, so the malware authors attention will be drawn towards the platform. The advice would be that if you don’t have an AV yet. Get one!