Trojan Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Apple updates malware definitions to address fake Flash player trojan

by Mike Schramm (Aug 12th, 2011)

Apple's updated an entry in the anti-malware files of OS X to lock down a trojan that pretends to be a Flash player installer, but actually hijacks users' search results. The trojan is known as "OSX.QHost.WB.A," and claims to install Flash, but instead redirects Google results to an IP in the ...

AppleCare rep tells Ed Bott Mac malware reports are up

by Dana Franklin (May 18th, 2011)

An anonymous AppleCare support representative spoke to ZDNet's Ed Bott over the weekend, telling the reporter that complaints about malware infections on the Mac increased significantly in the first half of May. "This last week over 50% of our calls have been about [malware]," said the AppleCare ...

New trojan MusMinim-A written for Mac OS X

by Dana Franklin (Feb 28th, 2011)

On Saturday, information security firm Sophos reported a new "backdoor Trojan" designed to allow remote operations and password "phishing" on systems running Mac OS X. The author of the Trojan refers to his or her work as "BlackHole RAT" and claims the malware is still in beta. Indeed, Sophos, ...

Mozilla evangelist asks Apple, Google and Microsoft to stop installing unwanted plug-ins

by Sam Abuelsamid (Dec 1st, 2010)

Asa Dotzler has been promoting Mozilla Firefox for more than six years, and he's not happy about other software vendors installing unwanted plug-ins in his browser. Among the vendors getting under Dotzler's skin are Apple, Google and Microsoft, each of whom also happen to produce a competing web ...

Pirated iWork contains botnet trojan, breaks hearts

by Aron Trimble (Apr 23rd, 2009)

The tubes are ablaze today with news from CNN of the first ever latest malicious program to be found on the Mac. The trojan was first discovered in January but it did not receive wildfire-like popularity until recently when two experts at Symantec published a bulletin on the subject of the malware. ...

Sophos video shows Mac trojan caught in the act

by Michael Rose (Mar 26th, 2009)

Apple Mac malware: Caught on camera from Sophos Labs on Vimeo. It's not every day that you can watch Mac malware in action, but the team at Sophos Labs has put together the demonstration video above; it shows a malicious installer downloaded from a site pretending to serve up an HD video ...

Intego: Adobe CS4 crack app has variant of iServices trojan

by Robert Palmer (Jan 26th, 2009)

The folks over at Intego let the world know about a new trojan making the rounds along with copies of an application designed to crack Adobe Creative Suite 4. They consider the risk "serious." If you don't download software using peer-to-peer tools like BitTorrent, then you're perfectly safe. You ...

New variant of RSPlug trojan making the rounds

by Robert Palmer (Nov 18th, 2008)

Our friends at Intego sent out an alert this morning, warning users about a new variant of the RSPlug trojan horse, found on several adult websites. The risk to users is classified as "medium." RSPlug trojans, themselves a form of DNSChanger, change local DNS settings to redirect to phishing sites ...

'MacGuard' double-plus ungood, avoid

by Robert Palmer (Oct 17th, 2008)

The fine folks at Intego sent out a warning this morning about MacGuard, a bogus piece of software that claims to clean up your system and remove adware, spyware, and trojans. It doesn't. According to the warning, MacGuard is simply a clone of a Windows app called WiniGuard. The company releasing ...

PC Tools iAntiVirus aims to be Mac specific

by Mat Lu (Jul 2nd, 2008)

With the recent trojan scare PC Tools' timing for the beta release of iAntiVirus for Mac could hardly be better. While there are a variety of anti-virus applications for the Mac, iAntiVirus seems to be especially designed to reduce resource usage by simply ignoring virus signatures for Windows. The ...

Watch out for PokerGame trojan

by Robert Palmer (Jun 20th, 2008)

In the wake of the ARDAgent vulnerability discovered yesterday, we all have something new to look out for: OSX.Trojan.PokerStealer is the official name of a trojan horse masquerading as a poker game. The trojan is distributed in a 65K .zip archive. According to security company Intego, running the ...

SecureMac identifies first ARDAgent-based trojan

by Robert Palmer (Jun 19th, 2008)

SecureMac has identified AppleScript.THT, a trojan-horse type virus of malware that exploits a Apple Remote Desktop Agent vulnerability publicized earlier this week that can "allow a malicious user complete access to the system." The malware is distributed as a compiled AppleScript, named ASthtv05, ...

Macworld explains how not to get bitten by malware

by Mat Lu (Nov 2nd, 2007)

We recently mentioned the new OS X malware that's floating around the (nether side) of the net these days. Over at Macworld, Rob Griffiths has an extensive article discussing the ways you can tell if a piece of downloaded software is fishy. The tips range from the obvious (only download from trusted ...

How to take Mac security seriously

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Mar 7th, 2006)

Damien went into detail about the "hacker challenge" story and, as he explained, it's much ado about nothing— for now. Clearly, this Mac security thing is only going to get more important. Even Headline News had a largely exaggerated report on the Bluetooth exploit found a while ...

First Tiger Trojan: Mac/Cowhand-A?

by C.K. Sample, III (Apr 25th, 2005)

My money is on this being another proof-of-concept design, but Sophos is listing a new Mac Trojan, dubbed Mac/Cowhand-A, which lets other people gain control of your Mac: "Mac/Cowhand-A is a proxy Trojan for the Mac OSX platform. The Trojan may copy itself to the user's Preferences folder. In ...