Mac virus...

xebec

Not sure how much we should be worried about it, but a new virus for macs is being reported here.

Guess everyone should be careful about the disk images they download for the next while.

Urban Weigl

Since I do work in an industry that deals with IT security, though not with Mac's, this does appear like a potentially serious security hole to me.

However, so far there are no exploits for it, so you are safe at the moment. In general, I recommend turning off "Open "safe" files after download" in Safari, if you use Safari to surf the web.

uncle_sam_ie

Also, two things to remember. One, never run as an administrator. Set up a standard account and use that. Two, get into the habit of command or right clicking files that you've downloaded to see what they want to open with. A picture file wanting to open in Terminal would be a red flag.

Sad Professor

Urban Weigi wrote:

In general, I recommend turning off "Open "safe" files after download" in Safari, if you use Safari to surf the web.

Always good advice. I never liked this feature in Safari. Apple was just looking for trouble when they added it.

ZENER

uncle_sam_ie wrote:

. . . get into the habit of command or right clicking files that you've downloaded to see what they want to open with. A picture file wanting to open in Terminal would be a red flag.

Excellent bit of advice !!!

ZEN

greglo23

for mac antivirus look here http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/15850

Urban Weigl

It appears this is not exploitable after all, and has been downgraded as such. Another false alarm: a maliciously crafted DMG (disk image) has the potential to cause a kernel panic and require you to reboot your Mac, but it cannot exploit anything, install anything or indeed execute any code after all.

K.O.Kiki

Another victory for OS X!!

SouperComputer

Im tired of so-called exploits being published that are either on unpatched systems, not properly tested, are impractical to exploit or do practically fook all damage to the system unless the user is logged in as root (as opposed to admin)

I just wish a couple of decent ones could be found so we can move on.

K.O.Kiki

Mind you, there *was* a security update there last week -- so if that was a vulnerability, it's probably been patched now.

xebec

K.O.Kiki wrote:

Mind you, there *was* a security update there last week -- so if that was a vulnerability, it's probably been patched now.

Nope, the .dmg bug wasn't fixed in that update, it was for a few other things.

K.O.Kiki

xebec wrote:

Nope, the .dmg bug wasn't fixed in that update, it was for a few other things.

That'll teach me to read what's actually IN the update so!