There are tens of thousands of people willing to give up their life savings because a guy said the world was supposed to end last weekend...how is Apple or anyone ever supposed to prevent people from entering their CC info to purchase a fake antivirus app? They can't cure stupid.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
New 'MACDefender' Variant Installs Without Admin Password Requirement
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
There are tens of thousands of people willing to give up their life savings because a guy said the world was supposed to end last weekend...how is Apple or anyone ever supposed to prevent people from entering their CC info to purchase a fake antivirus app? They can't cure stupid.
I was thinking the same thing. Follow the money trail, there's got to be somebody withdrawing $$$$ some place.
On second thought, sending McGyver after them with a pocket knife, candle wax and some rope or duck tape may do the trick=
Scrap that, we have more faith in team 6!
The point is You don't have to install it. I have no doubt they put in an incredible amount of work into it, and I would have loved to see the payload and the admins who had to go into work that day.
So with resepct to "windows getting viruses just by looking at the net", it's true.
It has nothing to do with popularity, but how NT was designed fundamentally. YOu may know this but not many do. So many useless services running in the background (which M$) has gotten better at correcting but it still isn't eliminated. Windows was designed for remote admin and and centralized control. Harnessing this for nefarious reasons was a natural progression.
*nix at its core is designed for scalability but not so much workstation use or remote administration.
Maybe a good trojan, but not a virus. Last time you heard about virus (as in real virus) on a Unix system?
Exploiting a hole in Safari is not even in the same neighbourhood as writing a REAL virus for a Unix system.
Launching an app isn't the same as installing one
it was patched 3 days before the contest. The only reason the guy still won is because they locked the versions two weeks before the contest and thus before the update which even he admitted rendered his hack useless.
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)
It's not nitpicking. One is condiderably more dangerous than the other. They should be distinguished.
DavidLeblond said:
It's not nitpicking. One is condiderably more dangerous than the other. They should be distinguished.
I was thinking the same thing. Follow the money trail, there's got to be somebody withdrawing $$$$ some place.
On second thought, sending McGyver after them with a pocket knife, candle wax and some rope or duck tape may do the trick=
Scrap that, we have more faith in team 6!
Maybe they don't charge the credit card - maybe they just collect the credit card information and sell that for much more money than this lame charge.
LMAO
All the posts about it "being over" for macs in terms of malware are just silly. This is the decennial malware. It will be dealt with and we'll see the next a decade from now.
The other day we had people wanting to see mac malware so bad that they were calling a phishing attempt malware as though it were OS specific.
All the posts about it "being over" for macs in terms of malware are just silly. This is the decennial malware. It will be dealt with and we'll see the next a decade from now.
The other day we had people wanting to see mac malware so bad that they were calling a phishing attempt malware as though it were OS specific.
Of course. The point is a guy can gain access to OSX for something as little as a contest. But if the resources required to create stuxnet were applied to creating OSX viruses then I have no doubt it could happen.
It's just a matter of applying enough resources. Nothing out there is immune. Some things simply take longer. You pick your targets based upon the highest reward you wish to achieve.
Why is everything always turning into PC vs. Apple users with the usual I can piss higher attitude?
Clearly this is a threat (call it what you want) for the majority of Apple users, who listened to common drivel of sales people and Apple that Mac's don't get anything bad. (At least the eluded to that)
Education is what really should be happening.
Anything the user doesn't initiate should be questioned.
There is no way to protect people from themselves, all we can do is minimize damages by educating our friends and relatives.
Clearly this is a threat (call it what you want) for the majority of Apple users, who listened to common drivel of sales people and Apple that Mac's don't get anything bad. (At least the eluded to that)
Education is what really should be happening.
Anything the user doesn't initiate should be questioned.
There is no way to protect people from themselves, all we can do is minimize damages by educating our friends and relatives.
He can do that on any OS using any web browser (which is in top 5 most unsucure applications list all the time). Still he needs a dumb *** to click yes.
I highly doubt that it's that easy "a matter of resources".
Of course. But by default safari opens files upon download. And while you and I may disable that or cancel any installs most people would not. Most people just don't know about or don't understand this stuff.
I use to work in an IT department. I can tell you some of the things considered "malware" are quite dangerous. We had one take down our network, undetected by McAfee (in fact it wiped McAfee on all our machines) and send a lot of sensitive data god knows where. When we asked McAfee why they didn't detect it they told us "You have virus scan. That wasn't a virus, that was a trojan."
So yeah, in my opinion it is nitpicking. Like I said before, "Trojan Horses", "ANSI Bombs", and "Worms" alllll use to be under the "Virus" umbrella. The definition was changed by the people who make money off of them.
I'm sorry, but this is just plain ignorant. Weekly coverage of every piece of malware? How much malware have you seen for the Mac period that you can make it out to be a weekly occurrence?
Fanboys acting like no one will fall for this sort of thing obviously haven't been watching the number of support phone calls that Apple has been getting on this issue alone or the fact that Apple (rather quickly) is putting anti-malware into OSX on a 1:1 basis right now. If these types of trojans suddenly go viral so-to-speak, just watch Apple try to keep up. Some of you don't see the forest for the tree here or playing "it doesn't matter" games. I've NEVER gotten a virus on my Win98 or WinXP machine (I have gotten two trojans because they were posing as legit programs and they even functioned as such; they STILL had a backdoor in them keylogging and what not; fortunately AVG picked them right up).
Viruses are old news. If this program wanted to do something malicious, it'd be making more news. Most malware in 2011 is designed to make easy money for a bunch of half-baked scam artists. They aren't as sophisticated as viruses. They don't have to be with so many people world-wide using computers these days. You don't need to catch a billion fish to not be hungry....
Responsible/intelligent/wise people would make a mental note of these issues and how to safely avoid them and move on. Immature people spend all day posting how stupid everyone else is or how Mac users are uber-intelligent creatures that never fall for scams. All of it is a waste of time and a waste of space on Earth. It's a bunch of chest-thumping "I'm the bigger alpha male than the rest of Earth". How useless.
Žalgiris;12630479 said:
Actually nobody had to click yes. I'm not sure he could accomplish that in chrome but who knows.
But that's not the point I was trying to make. My point was about resources required to create security hacks/malware, etc. Nothing is fullproof.
It happens when narrow-minded and insecure people talk to or blog with other narrow-minded and insecure people.
I love all the people that don't know the difference between a virus and malware!
The fact of the matter is it doesn't matter what the difference is when people are willing to click yes to anything and email cutsy little files all around the web and type their credit cards in anywhere they can fill in a form.
If people are going to click yes then nothing can protect them.
I love all the people that don't know the difference between a virus and malware!
I think you meant to say the different between a virus and a trojan.
'Malware' encompasses both.
Going to a specific web page then it's still a task user needs to do. Since they had physical access to the computer they just browse to that page.
Which one? The one that took three people and two weeks to find the fault and then and had to write a script before-hand through the web so that would be easy to hack later?
I'm sorry, but this is just plain ignorant. Weekly coverage of every piece of malware? How much malware have you seen for the Mac period that you can make it out to be a weekly occurrence?
Fanboys acting like no one will fall for this sort of thing obviously haven't been watching the number of support phone calls that Apple has been getting on this issue alone or the fact that Apple (rather quickly) is putting anti-malware into OSX on a 1:1 basis right now. If these types of trojans suddenly go viral so-to-speak, just watch Apple try to keep up. Some of you don't see the forest for the tree here or playing "it doesn't matter" games. I've NEVER gotten a virus on my Win98 or WinXP machine (I have gotten two trojans because they were posing as legit programs and they even functioned as such; they STILL had a backdoor in them keylogging and what not; fortunately AVG picked them right up).
Viruses are old news. If this program wanted to do something malicious, it'd be making more news. Most malware in 2011 is designed to make easy money for a bunch of half-baked scam artists. They aren't as sophisticated as viruses. They don't have to be with so many people world-wide using computers these days. You don't need to catch a billion fish to not be hungry....
Responsible/intelligent/wise people would make a mental note of these issues and how to safely avoid them and move on. Immature people spend all day posting how stupid everyone else is or how Mac users are uber-intelligent creatures that never fall for scams. All of it is a waste of time and a waste of space on Earth. It's a bunch of chest-thumping "I'm the bigger alpha male than the rest of Earth". How useless.
ZZZZZZzzzzzzzz
Scrolling through your post, the message is that fanboys as you call them do not do something you deem intelligent people do so fanboys must not be intelligent.
Seriously it shows right through your post how happy you are to FINALLY get a chance to suggest mac users will soon be spending the time and money you do combating malware. It isn't going to be an issue. Trust me.
If you want to talk about intelligence and fighting malware, then I'd say intelligent people would get a mac. End of story. Even if malware were to come to the mac at the quantities seen in the windows world, there would still be a window of time without the need to waste energy and time on the subject. And likely the amount of malware on macs will never come close to that on windows. But to waste the opportunity to avoid just a few years time wasted fighting viruses is not very bright. So get yourself a mac. And then you won't feel the need to waste time sticking it to the mac crowd all the time either. Its a win-win situation for you.
It's called XProtect, and it's been there for a while. There's an update rumored to be on the way, within the week probably, to block this MacDefender and all it's variants.
jW