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iLoveMyApple

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 26, 2008
938
169
Southern California
I have an iMac running Tiger 10.4.11 and I scanned it using ProtectMac Anti Virus. And it found 2 adware and 1 trojan. How do I get rid of these? Where do I start? Please help?
 
How do I get rid of them? It says underneath the 3 threats detected "delete file" do I click that or do I download another program? Help! I've never dealt with viruses before:(
 
You are not dealing with files that can harm your computer! No viruses work on macs, if these even are dangerous files they can only harm a computer running Windows. Try using Spotlight to search for these files and it will show exactly where they are.
 
The name of the infected file should have shown up, if it was an unneeded file you can simply delete it.

If it looked like the file was something you need to keep, you can debate deleting it and redownloading the app.

The majority of the infected files would likely be files you downloaded or crap that people e-mailed to you, especially those that keep forwarding you the cute and silly e-mail crap -- which might include .exe files you can't do anything with, but might have forgotten to delete.
 
The whole "no virus" thing is MOSTLY right. They exist, they just can't be used without you actively installing them (i.e., they would have to be downloaded without you agreeing, opened without you doing anything, and then approved w/ a root password without you entering your root password, all of which is highly improbable under OSX or any other Darwin/Debian/Unix/etc. system).
 
The whole "no virus" thing is MOSTLY right. They exist, they just can't be used without you actively installing them (i.e., they would have to be downloaded without you agreeing, opened without you doing anything, and then approved w/ a root password without you entering your root password, all of which is highly improbable under OSX or any other Darwin/Debian/Unix/etc. system).

No, it's 100% right.

What you described is a trojan.
 
Wtf

I just manually scanned my computer and found a huge threat. Spotlight picked up "I'm thinking about installing Windows via Boot Camp."

So I deleted that cached adium file. Computer still works fine.
 
No, it's 100% right.

What you described is a trojan.

Depends on what he meant by "no virus." Proof of concept true viruses have been demonstrated, so they do exist.

In the wild, they don't exist. At least, not yet.

And even though I'm a smug "no virus" Mac guy in public, every step used in describing a trojan in the above description can be bypassed.
 
Depends on what he meant by "no virus." Proof of concept true viruses have been demonstrated, so they do exist.

And even though I'm a smug "no virus" Mac guy in public, every step used in describing a trojan in the above description can be bypassed.

I've only found one "proof of concept" virus, which is called OSX.Macarena, which was discovered by Syamntec, an antivirus company. As hard as I Googled, there was no information on how it actually worked. Because it doesn't.
 
I've only found one "proof of concept" virus, which is called OSX.Macarena, which was discovered by Syamntec, an antivirus company. As hard as I Googled, there was no information on how it actually worked. Because it doesn't.

Well, googling "os x virus proof of concept" reveals a few more, but I hadn't realized that some of them had be debunked, so to speak.
 
Well, googling "os x virus proof of concept" reveals a few more, but I hadn't realized that some of them had be debunked, so to speak.

Some of the others weren't really viruses, just theoretical designs for pieces of software developed specifically to exploit old bugs in Apple's software.
 
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