Some virus/trojan/worm or something attacked Mac OS X Mail in my computer

[63dot]

So today I get an email named "cookies" or something to that effect and when I open it, from a friend I know, an animation slide show starts. I can't escape from it and when I reboot, much of my inbox in Mail is deleted.

Strangely, the sent items, drafts, and trash items in Mail are OK. It's only some of the inbox items which just disappeared.

What's with that, or is this a known OS X (Tiger) issue I just finally came across?

Thanks in advance.

 

[angelwatt]

I haven't heard of any trojan for Mac that does this. Do you know what file type the animation was? Perhaps .pps (Powerpoint presentation)? Those open full screen. If that was the case it would be possible there was a malicious macro or trojan in the file that exploited a MS Office weakness. It may have also been a Flash file that could do some bad things.

Do you have backups? Are you certain emails are deleted/missing? When you said you couldn't escape the full screen animation, what did you try (esc, cmd+q, force quit)? Also, what was the animation you saw? It might help track down if others have had this problem. It may be something as simple as a partially corrupt file that doesn't run on Mac very well and corrupted some of your email causing them to get deleted.

 

[63dot]

I haven't heard of any trojan for Mac that does this. Do you know what file type the animation was? Perhaps .pps (Powerpoint presentation)? Those open full screen. If that was the case it would be possible there was a malicious macro or trojan in the file that exploited a MS Office weakness. It may have also been a Flash file that could do some bad things.

Do you have backups? Are you certain emails are deleted/missing? When you said you couldn't escape the full screen animation, what did you try (esc, cmd+q, force quit)? Also, what was the animation you saw? It might help track down if others have had this problem. It may be something as simple as a partially corrupt file that doesn't run on Mac very well and corrupted some of your email causing them to get deleted.

Here's what I know:

Power point presentation

animated cartoon characters (santa, milk and cookies, dancing girl)

full screen with no way to get out of it

I held down the power button and rebooted, and of course I tossed the email which had in it the option of a power point presentation and also had about 20 jpegs as attachments

..............

I put clamav anti-virus on the Mac and cleaned things up but no viruses were found so I suspect the virus/malware/trojan/worm/whatever was in the email which deleted some items from the inbox of OS X Mail progam.

Every source I checked basically said, Mac or PC, just be careful what you open up in emails. But in over 10 years of using Macs, I have never had any issues so it's a lot better than running Windows which I did for years, too. Windows, as we all know, has issues to say the least with the world of viruses and malware.