Mac Trojan BlackHole RAT gets rewritten and becomes scarier

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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