The First Apple Mac Virus Rears its Ugly Head
IBotnet Virus: Apple’s First Worm
Researchers are reporting the first Macintosh-specific worm to be found “in the wild” on the Internet, the IBotnet Virus. The good news is that, as far as worms go, this one seems to be a weakling.
Symantec guesses that only a couple of thousand machines have been infected. That being the case, it likely won’t be of any practical value to cyber criminals, which are known to use networks of millions of PCs to perpetrate denial service attacks or send huge volumes of spam, for example.
The IBotnet virus is a Mac-specific Trojan Horse program that infects a machine only by downloading a pirated copy of iWork, the Apple productivity suite or Adobe Photoshop CS4. It does not spread from peer-to-peer on its own.
The finger is being pointed at BitTorrent, a popular site that enables users to share large files, as the avenue by which pirated copies were downloaded onto Mac computers.
Experts say iBotNet infects only a few thousand computers at most and is not a danger to the average Mac user. Some people won’t even notice the effect of it.
“Quite frankly there is no functionality in this ‘bot’ that we have not seen before,” Dave Marcus, head of research and communications at McAfee Avert Labs, said in a blog post. “The only thing of concern is that it affects the Mac platform, which certainly is fresh territory.”
In a statement, Apple said it is working to prevent security problems.
“Apple takes security very seriously and has a great track record of addressing potential vulnerabilities before they can affect users,” the statement says.
While the security experts probably won’t come out and say it, this whole scare appears to be an elaborate to provide “conceptual truth” –ie: hackers attempting to put perceived snooty Mac users in their place by highlighting the fact that their (news flash) operating system of choice isn’t so secure after all.