I just got an email from my father who's co-worker who is a mac user sent him.
The blogs were abuzz with news of what some called the first "virus"
for Mac OS X.
If you download the file "lastestpics.tgz" and enter your password to
uncompress and run it, it would attempt to send the file to everyone
in your iChat buddy list.
(Who would open a file named "latestpics?" WHo would open a .tgz file??)
So, it's not a virus. It requires user action to download,
decompress, and launch the program. I don't know about you, but I
don't think I would ever download a file with the ".tgz" extension.
That screams WATCH OUT! You cannot be infected with this malicious
software unless you intentionally download the file.
Then you would have to double-click on a generic icon to decompress
it , and then double-click on the resulting file.
Depending on how you have your system preferences set up, you would
probably have to enter your admin password,too.
You can't "catch" this "virus" by doing nothing=97 like you can when I
sneeze on you.
Symantec, which has a vested interest in discovering security issues
so they can sell you some software, has classified this Oompa Loompa
Trojan as a category 1 threat (on at 5-point scale with 5 being the
_________________________________________________________________
Ok don't flame me for this, I just want to get the word out in case this is real. Just watch out for that file.
P.S. This is the exact message they sent me. below the line is what I typed
The blogs were abuzz with news of what some called the first "virus"
for Mac OS X.
If you download the file "lastestpics.tgz" and enter your password to
uncompress and run it, it would attempt to send the file to everyone
in your iChat buddy list.
(Who would open a file named "latestpics?" WHo would open a .tgz file??)
So, it's not a virus. It requires user action to download,
decompress, and launch the program. I don't know about you, but I
don't think I would ever download a file with the ".tgz" extension.
That screams WATCH OUT! You cannot be infected with this malicious
software unless you intentionally download the file.
Then you would have to double-click on a generic icon to decompress
it , and then double-click on the resulting file.
Depending on how you have your system preferences set up, you would
probably have to enter your admin password,too.
You can't "catch" this "virus" by doing nothing=97 like you can when I
sneeze on you.
Symantec, which has a vested interest in discovering security issues
so they can sell you some software, has classified this Oompa Loompa
Trojan as a category 1 threat (on at 5-point scale with 5 being the
_________________________________________________________________
Ok don't flame me for this, I just want to get the word out in case this is real. Just watch out for that file.
P.S. This is the exact message they sent me. below the line is what I typed
