Yep, nowhere near as bad as the Russian virus the KGB administered from the top of a brolly! 😱
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Raid on Russian Firm May Have Taken Down MacDefender Malware
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Yep, nowhere near as bad as the Russian virus the KGB administered from the top of a brolly! 😱
Try to remember back when you were a newbie and not the techno-sophistic you are now. There is a learning curve. People come to sites like MR so they can learn (and not be duped by malware).
A tiny bit of empathy might be in order. 🙄
It is a non-virus, and a non-virus cannot infect anything. It is a trojan horse, NOT a virus.
Mac OS X has always been virus-free, and still is.
That's false. Trojans can and do infect computers, just like viruses and worms. They simply require user interaction and permission to do so.
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)
MacDefender had completely slipped my mind. Must have been due to no constant reminders for the past six weeks.
MacDefender had completely slipped my mind. Must have been due to no constant reminders for the past six weeks.
This is very good news
I'm sorry for the Russian people, because so many of their businessmen are lawless. This is awful for them. Of course, our economically wise business leaders would never become so reckless-- Never mind.
But if we can ever rely on international definition and enforcement of Internet safety and freedom -- the two go together -- so that we'd know that many thieves will go to jail, then the more cases like this, the better.
I'm sorry for the Russian people, because so many of their businessmen are lawless. This is awful for them. Of course, our economically wise business leaders would never become so reckless-- Never mind.
But if we can ever rely on international definition and enforcement of Internet safety and freedom -- the two go together -- so that we'd know that many thieves will go to jail, then the more cases like this, the better.
Just adding to your's. The main difference is that Trojans do not self replicate like Viruses and Worms but they can be just as destructive.
To the general public anything bad that gets on your computer is a virus. You can argue semantics and terminology all you want but almost everybody will call it a virus no matter what. It doesn't matter to John Doe if he installed it himself by entering his password, he will blame the computer. The term has made it into the lexicon of the massess. You can't change it.
Unfortunately, that's just not true. It's incredibly easy to apply for and obtain a merchant account.
Nobody cares about this argument anymore, and it certainly doesn't help prove a point. Malware/virus/trojan/worm all stand for things that aren't welcome. The technical differences between them are not important.
Euhm ... soviet russia doesn't exist anymore ... It has been disbanded like 20 years ago 😛. There're few countries more Capitalistic then mother Russia right now.
+ Kaspersky is one of the major players in the AV market. So saying that everything Russia produces is malware, is a severe overstatement.
But that doesn't mean it isn't one of the major players in the hacking industry 🙄. That's mostly because Russia is known for having a highly uncooperative gouvernement, concerning international cyber crime. It's not like all hackers live in Russia, but lots of (Blackhat, European) hackers highjack Russian servers, which they control via SSH, or use as a proxy, so they're real ip is virtually untraceable.
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Wrong.
Right.
Defending against a trojan is always going to be a reactionary measure. Unless you prevent installation of software on the machine from Web downloads or from nefarious media (Mac App Store?) you can only stop a trojan after it has struck at least one user. Essentially, a trojan can be written for your system no matter how secure it is.
However, a virus exploits known security flaws in your system and typically replicates itself and tries to move on to other machines as well. The maker of the operating system is directly responsible for letting the virus on to the computer.
Are Macs virus free because Apple writes better software? Certainly the exploit used for JailBreakMe.com could have been used for a virus to gain access to the machine. New security measures in Lion like sand-boxing the PDF viewer/parser or the video decoders are going to go a long way to stopping exploits like that.
But the only security measure that Mac OS X can add to stop a Trojan is to require all application installations to go through the Mac App Store unless you go through some sort of questionnaire that first verifies that you are in fact savvy enough to know what it is you are installing.
The credit card companies don't care about stopping thieves. I'm betting they do the cost analysis and decide it's too expensive to go after them and it's cheaper just to let them get money.
Seriously. They make more money by making things easy to use them then they do by stopping people from stealing. Most off the time they don't get affected (They just refuse to pay the merchant if some one paid the merchant with a stolen card).'
Of course, I say this cause I"m a little jaded. I had my ID stolen years ago... all the thief had was my frikkin SSN number and my name. Seriously, he didn't even have my birthdate right or where I lived. 13 banks allowed him to open a credit card in my name (or allowed poeple he sold my ID to). ONe of those banks told me they thought something was fishy about the application. So they closed the card *AFTER* the guy transferred 15k of debt on to the card. Obviously the banks would rather give out cards like candy cause they make more money encouraging people to buy irresponsibly than money they lose to fraudalant charges (you think I or the thief paid the bank back that 15k of money? No. I'm not paying it, I didn't charge it. And of course the thief isn't going to pay it).
In my experience, banks/credit card companies don't give one ***** about theft. They make more money by worrying about getting you to spend more (which also involves not hassling anyone who is using the card. It's why they want you to sign for charges rather than enter a pin. Entering a pin might cause some people not to use the card cause it's too inconvenient though entering a pin is far more secure than just putting a signature down).
