Heads-up: OS X Malware Trojan

[Jon Thomasberg]

http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/trojan-downloader_osx_flashback_i.shtml

Get yourself checked!!


http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57409619-83/more-than-600000-macs-infected-with-flashback-botnet/
backstory

[Josh Beadle]

best way to get sick is to go to the hospital - best way to get your computer infected is to download a "virus check utility" from the internet

[Ambarish Manepalli]

Thanks for this! I'm clean.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I think I might have had this on my '09 Mac Pro tower before I completely wiped the main HDD and installed Lion a few weeks back. I've seen various discussions around, but it seems that one of the symptoms of having this malware is gradual slowing of your browser and Flash performance until you restart your system, then it starts all over again.

As for Josh's cynical perspective about getting infected by downloading those utilities... He's pretty much right. The majority of all those performance tuning and free system check sites and apps out there, especially in PC land, are nothing more than a conduit for spyware/malware themselves.

In this case, you can check for this malware by running some terminal commands and then taking the necessary steps to remove it if needed.

[Brian Merlen]

other then reinstalling all your stuff after formatting, or going into terminal, is there anyway else to fix this yet?

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Sweet glorious Karma.

[Greg M]

Try Dr. Web Lite in the app store

[stu aull]

Apple has posted a Java fix via here:

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-57408874-263/java-update-for-os-x-patches-flashback-malware-exploit/


Thanks for the heads-up Jon!!
Stu Aull
Alaska

[Paul Ellington]

Sophos is free and really good, I used that after the November 3rd attack.

[Martin Weiss]

http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/100000/50000/6000/700/156716/156716.strip.gif

[KETCH ROSSi]

Safest thing... NEVER DOWNLOAD anything to fix anything on a MAC, just check for updates, MAC has been super good in getting all fixes and updates up pretty fast, did this on all my MACs.

[Subhadip Sen]

Safest thing... NEVER DOWNLOAD anything to fix anything on a MAC, just check for updates, MAC has been super good in getting all fixes and updates up pretty fast, did this on all my MACs.

On the contrary, Apple was extremely slow to fix this exploit, it took them 6 weeks to react. An exploit of this scale hasn't occurred for several years now, and would/should normally have been patched in a couple of days. Oracle had the fix out from their side in 3 days back in February. What were Apple doing? This should have been fixed back in February. Absolutely unacceptable. Even the smallest of hobbyist open source Linux distros would fix it within a week.

[Justin McAleece]

http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/100000/50000/6000/700/156716/156716.strip.gif

Very nice Martin!