(no subject)

[theweaselking]

Apple attempts to increase OS market share by shipping iPods with Windows virus set to install as soon as you plug in the device.

As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it.

Uh, no, you do NOT get to blame Windows for your own incompetence. Deliberately running malware on a Mac is just as damaging as running it on a windows PC - there's just less of it out there because nonstandard interfaces and defective functionality, running on custom hardware, with very little application support, is not and has never been a popular combination.

Worse, they go on to suggest 4 products to clean your system - two of which, Norton AV Trial Edition and McAfee AV Trial, are so intrusive that I would mark them as viruses myself. If you pay for them every time they demand money, they work. If you don't, you can almost never get rid of them completely.

Comments

[zenten.livejournal.com]

The kind of person who gets this virus is the kind of person who runs things while logged in to an admin account, which, on both debian and MacOS, means that any program you run can steal root access from there.


This is the step I'm sceptical about, when it comes to MacOS.

[zenten.livejournal.com]

In that it will be able to get root access from the admin account.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

It's a known exploit, since april 2003.

Run malware as admin. It stays resident and does nothing except set itself to start automatically if you reboot, if it can.

It watches /var/log.

When you use sudo, it shows in /var/log
It runs sudo after you, giving root access without requiring a password.

[mazarinade.livejournal.com]

Fixed in recent versions, I understand, and trivially easy to fix if you have an older version.