Mac Trojans are nothing new, albeit rare in the Mac Community at this time. SecureMac has identified a new trojan, dubbed BlackHole RAT 2.0 by the trojan’s author, that is a variant on one discovered in February called OSX/BlackHoleRAT.B.
This new trojan looks to be a rewrite of the original. The new changes include creating itself as a login item to be run automatically at startup, tying up CPU cycles by running a loop, executing shell commands (which can be dangerous) and in some cases attempting to erase the hard drive. This trojan is still a work in progress, but it is available to the Mac hacking community for testing.
I am not sure how many people will immediately be affected by this. One of the issues with Mac trojans is that they are rare, and even SecureMac has rated the Security Risk of this trojan as low. It’s not necessarily something most Mac users need to worry about, but it is something to keep in the back of your mind.
Article Via SFGate.com
Photo Credit: djc1982 on Flickr
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I just backed up my hard drive...
Just out of curiosity, what's the Application on the dock between iCal & Address Book?
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LikeReally scary stuff and it just goes to show that the Mac as a platform is not immune to malware, which no computer system can ever truly be. While the foundation in Mac OS X is quite good, it's not perfect and we should all be aware of the potential risks, as small as they might be. Just have the security aspect in mind, don't accept stuff from unknown sources and don't run as root all the time.
We are far from the bad situation Windows is in and we should be very glad about that. As the platform gets more popular we will most likely need to be more vigilant, if not perhaps quite as vigilant as Windows users. Common sense and staying away from the nastier places of the web goes a long way.
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