Virus on iMac

[britishtiger]

Hello All

I'm new here, and will like to seek some advice.

I'm running Mountain Lion, and recently I received an email with a video file.

I opened the video file, and the sender later informed me there were some metadata attached to it.

My social network details were then compromised as the details were sent to the sender.

How do I resolve this and clean up the system? I can think of reformatting the whole mac to clean it, but will I have to reformat any external drives attached to the Mac as well? I have a external hard disk attached to the mac.

Any advice is greatly appreciated, thanks!

 

[Drew017]

Hello All

I'm new here, and will like to seek some advice.

I'm running Mountain Lion, and recently I received an email with a video file.

I opened the video file, and the sender later informed me there were some metadata attached to it.

My social network details were then compromised as the details were sent to the sender.

How do I resolve this and clean up the system? I can think of reformatting the whole mac to clean it, but will I have to reformat any external drives attached to the Mac as well? I have a external hard disk attached to the mac.

Any advice is greatly appreciated, thanks!

As far as I can tell, that just seems to be a spam email that someone sent you. You don't need to worry about your Mac getting infected from a virus, because there are no true viruses out there that exist for OS X. If I were you, I would just delete the message, and change the passwords for your social network(s) and you should be fine.

 

[britishtiger]

Will any residual malware be residing in any of the hard disks that I have connected to the iMac?

It seems to be a self written malware program, thus it's not in the wild

 

[Drew017]

Will any residual malware be residing in any of the hard disks that I have connected to the iMac?

It seems to be a self written malware program, thus it's not in the wild

what seems to be a self written malware program? I'm not really following you.

This may help…

Mac Virus/ Maleware FAQ

 

[britishtiger]

Hi drew

Thanks for the info.

I believe that what my Mac is infected with is some sort of a key logger that is undetectable when I scan the Mac for viruses.

Are there any logs I can turn on to see outgoing traffic?

 

[GGJstudios]

I believe that what my Mac is infected with is some sort of a key logger that is undetectable when I scan the Mac for viruses.

Are there any logs I can turn on to see outgoing traffic?

The only way you can get a keylogger on your Mac is to install it yourself or give someone access to your computer to install it. If your social networking accounts were compromised, it was most likely due to your email account being hacked. Change your passwords on all accounts and make sure they're long and complex, using special characters, numbers and upper and lower case letters.

It is extremely unlikely that your issue has anything to do with malware. Read the link that Drew017 posted. There are no Mac OS X viruses in the wild, and only a handful of trojans.