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Apple Investigating 'MACDefender' Malware, Support Staff Barred From Assisting Customers
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Depends on what that someone is actually doing with the data. If they are taking your CC details and using it to put fraudulent charges on it, or selling lists of stolen CC numbers to other shady characters, then it's harder to track down.
EXACTLY.
Once upon a time we lived in an idyllic world where if a stranger offered a child candy, we thought "Aww, how nice of him."
Now we know there are dangers and we educate all of our children to watch out for this sort of thing. For better or for worse.
This is what needs to happen in the computer world.
I don't mean to belittle this "malware outbreak" but, as someone that works with infected Windows systems, the removal of this program is plain simple.
Stop in task manager. Drag program to trash. Remove from startup items.
I'm sure things will get more complex, but at the moment, compared to things I've seen before, this is laughable.
Stop in task manager. Drag program to trash. Remove from startup items.
I'm sure things will get more complex, but at the moment, compared to things I've seen before, this is laughable.
The problem is that many people and worse companies have a severe lack of common sense. My bank on occasion calls me and expects me to prove to them that I am me. By rights people should refuse. Plenty of internal company sites I used to use have expired https certs. I should refuse to use them. Verified by visa jumps into my credit card purchases and redirects me to a random looking url I know nothing about. I should close the browser at that point. Companies encourage people to ignore obvious warning signals by teaching them to bypass common sense due to necessity.
This is the problem with Apple advertising the no virus thing. Common use of "virus" puts malware as a virus. People think that they are safe and boom install malware and get a "virus"
It is coming back to bit Apple big time.
security.
Can you even disable authentication on the mac?
I mean you can disable/turn off UAC under Windows 7, but even if you could disable this authentication on a mac via root (for the tech savy users only who know what their doing) ... this still wouldn't do.
Bottom line though: it still all comes down to the users.. Bet this is a wake up call. You can do all sorts of stuff to make an OS super secure.. .. If it all exists on the local machine, it will be bypassed..
Theres no other way than just. common sense i reckon.
Can you even disable authentication on the mac?
I mean you can disable/turn off UAC under Windows 7, but even if you could disable this authentication on a mac via root (for the tech savy users only who know what their doing) ... this still wouldn't do.
Bottom line though: it still all comes down to the users.. Bet this is a wake up call. You can do all sorts of stuff to make an OS super secure.. .. If it all exists on the local machine, it will be bypassed..
Theres no other way than just. common sense i reckon.
not exactly true. removal instructions have been posted in this thread numerous times, and your procedure leaves files behind.
If I can be blunt - this needs to happen more in the Mac world than the general computer world. While Apple enthusiasts have been laughing at windows users for years - you could argue that at least windows users have been exposed and the idea of having virus protection is a "given"
Education does need to be across the board. It would also help if Apple, and it's customers (and by customers, I mean the die hards) acknowledge that ALL systems are vulnerable. No system is infallible.
Just because you live in a gated community doesn't mean there isn't crime.
And just because you live in the slums, doesn't mean you're going to become a victim of a crime either.
Dude, time to change banks and the companies you are dealing with. I've never had any of those things happen with the banks/companies I deal with.
About 34 years here, and I designed and successfully defended, to an NSA-appointed security evaluation team, a C2 security architecture for a workstation.
No, the two are very different. A Trojan Horse does not rely on a security flaw in the host OS. It relies on tricking users into giving permission for the installation and/or execution of the malicious software. It does this by purporting to be some useful or desirable piece of software, such as a free virus scanner or a program that gives free access to adult web sites. Unlike a virus, a Trojan does not self-replicate by attaching itself to other executable files.
The spreading of a virus or worm is often indicative of a security flaw in an OS or application. Examples include those Windows worms spread through e-mail, which relied on Outlook's idiotic behavior of simply executing script that it received in an e-mail.
P.T. Barnum had it pegged
we tell ppl over and over again that they don't need antivirus s/w, because you can't install software on a Mac without your permission and that they need to not install anything they didn't actually ask for. Unfortunately people don't listen to us. The ppl that are doing this rely on the fact that "There's a sucker born every minute!" Ignorance is temporary, but stupid lasts forever.
we tell ppl over and over again that they don't need antivirus s/w, because you can't install software on a Mac without your permission and that they need to not install anything they didn't actually ask for. Unfortunately people don't listen to us. The ppl that are doing this rely on the fact that "There's a sucker born every minute!" Ignorance is temporary, but stupid lasts forever.
Now that's a classic example of a Mac fanboy comment, and completely false.This is just microsoft fanboys trying to to make osx look bad. Macs are immune to all virusand malware.
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The arrogance of some in this thread is astounding. IQ has nothing to do with it. A lack of knowledge perhaps.
The arrogance of some in this thread is astounding. IQ has nothing to do with it. A lack of knowledge perhaps.
The point of my post was not to provide a detailed procedure to help those infected, else I'd have provided a link, but instead to demonstrate the simplicity of defeating this malware.
Compared to the current state of Windows malware, it's truly primitive.
This is a crazy thread.
I've only just moved from windows and you get this all the time.
Its scary that people out there click to install this stuff. People will now start to pick holes in apple when they haven't done anything wrong.
Seriously people stop downloading random stuff!!
I've only just moved from windows and you get this all the time.
Its scary that people out there click to install this stuff. People will now start to pick holes in apple when they haven't done anything wrong.
Seriously people stop downloading random stuff!!
This isn't a "virus." The user chose to install a program, providing an administrator password to do so. How the hell can you blame Apple's advertising? It's not like Apple said "If you choose to install malicious software, your Mac will protect you." They said that it's relatively free from viruses, which it is.
Analogy:
- Guy shows up uninvited and claims he will inspect and detail your car for free.
- You say okay and hand him the keys.
- He steals your car.
- You get on the forums and say that it's Ford's fault for advertising that their alarm system prevents thefts, which gave you a false sense of security.
Honestly, this is a good argument for having an iOS like mode for OS X. You only can install things from the Mac App Store and the file system is mostly abstracted away. Current computers really are like giving someone who needs to get to work a dump-truck and expecting them not to run over someone's car. Just like how you don't expect most people to know how to use a mainframe we should change our expectations of what computer users need to be able to do because the our expectations are obviously not aligned with reality.
I'm, of course, not saying OS X as is should not be available; just that it should not be the only way to use a computer (i.e. OS X has a CLI even though most people don't use it).
I'm, of course, not saying OS X as is should not be available; just that it should not be the only way to use a computer (i.e. OS X has a CLI even though most people don't use it).
You're assuming the general pubic knows the difference between a virus, malware, trojan, etc
Most don't. They see them all as the same. For better or worse. And Apple has commercials on TV, reps in stores, etc all touting that you don't need virus protection for a Mac.
You want to sincerely say that Apple takes NO blame in not educating their customers better?
I don't recall them saying on their ads and in the stores "Macs don't get Viruses - but let me explain that Macs can still be infected by software you don't want on your system..."
It's somewhat ironic, in a way, that the only Mac "virus" (trojan, not virus) will only get people who manually install it because they think they need an antivirus on a Mac.
Expect waves of people proclaiming that Macs have viruses too, etc etc, when this is actually just crapware that the user has to install.
Very true. Many users extent of computer knowledge is what they see on TV and don't understand that a virus, and a trojan are two completely different classification. In fact, this type of trojan is classified as a scareware since it masquerades as a legit program (hence where it can have a trojan classification) but scares the user into buying it to clean an infected system (scareware classification). It does not replicate itself or any of the other things viruses do and should not be classified as such. Antivirus most likely would never pick this up since it is in fact a legitimate software that uses social engineering to target its victims.
Actually Apple carefully words their site to say "Macs are not susceptible to PC viruses" which is very true. They also state that when a threat arises they issue patches automatically.
http://www.apple.com/why-mac/better-os/#viruses
They never deny that threats don't occur, they just talk about fixing it fast. I'm particularly interested in the safari scanning piece.
They keep me employed
I fix Windows servers and desktops for a living. And agreed, its been known since the 90's not to install stuff you don't know about.Every company is like this. No company, hardware or software will provide you with malware removal advice. The closest you will get is a corporate version of an antivirus package but thats meant for IT guys to use.
Correct. This program is technically legitimate. Its a scareware which can be classified both under a trojan (masquerading as a legit program) or a malware since its a program that has a bad end result for the user and is annoying to have on your system.
+1 I see a friend of mine falling for this trick. I keep telling him not to put antivirus on his mac and he keeps arguing with me. One of us has been fixing computers since 1997, the other only knows how to use the internet. I'll give you a guess which one of us is the one who wants to install antivirus on a mac
Nothing started, threats pop up more than people are aware of but Apple issues fixes through security patches. Your looking at one piece of known scareware in the past 2 years, thats literally nothing.
Waaaaay wrong. The whole "viruses can be prevented through smart computing" is a pure myth and nothing more. Some ways viruses at work spread:
-Through the network.
-Through USB drives.
-Infected webpages.
-Infected media.
If you were to to take away every way a virus could spread, you would cripple the use of a computer severely. As someone who works in IT and deals with viruses daily I can tell you there are many people who get infected through no fault of their own, they simply access a file from a network drive to work on that someone else infected. They have no way of knowing, they are practicing smart computing, they got infected by doing their job.
Trojans can easily be avoided but I can't say the same about viruses. If you are a home user its not as big of deal unless your downloading crap all the time or surfing a million different sites, but for corporate users its easy to catch a virus since a lot of thumbdrive sharing or network drive accessing is used.
Not to mention since a majority of corporations use Symantec it means that when there is a virus outbreak its sure to not ever get stopped (since Symantec never finds anything, or if it does it tells you about it then informs you it can't delete it.)
The description of your work makes it sound like you are more of an aerospace engineer than a rocket scientist.
"Rocket scientist" seems misapplied to anybody other than chemical engineers.
Now, if chemical engineers are switching to Macs, then the IQ of the Mac user base is going down.
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Most that are being seen show people have tried downloading it multiple times before installing it!
Bit it's easy to kill... Open activity monitor, force quit it... Delete the startup item under accounts, and then trash the application and empty Ur trash .... It's a joke
Most that are being seen show people have tried downloading it multiple times before installing it!
Bit it's easy to kill... Open activity monitor, force quit it... Delete the startup item under accounts, and then trash the application and empty Ur trash .... It's a joke