Written by blogmaster on December 10, 2007 – 1:21 pm
A trojan attack, shortcomings of Leopard’s firewall and failing hard drives hit Apple machines.
A malicious program that poses as a video engine, or codec, necessary to watch pornography could infect unsuspecting users of Apple’s Mac OS X, security firms warned.
The program has been spreading around Windows computers for some time. While the Windows version comes as a portable executable (PE) file, the new Mac version comes as a standard disk image (DMG) file.
The trojan is not considered a significant threat, as the victim has to supply the administrator password for the system to be infected. Still, it made big news because it targets the Macintosh platform. The arrival of a serious attempt to attack the Mac has been widely predicted by security professionals.
Separately, the release of Apple’s much vaunted Leopard operating system was marred by security concerns about its firewall. Users found Leopard’s built-in firewall deactivated when they upgraded from Tiger, the previous version of Mac OS X. Even after activation, the technology has a number of shortcomings, according to some experts.
To add to Mac related security concerns, a U.K.-based data-recovery organization has warned Apple Macbook users that they risk potential data loss due to a design flaw on certain 2.5-in. hard drives.
(Source: Computerworld, SecurityFocus, The Register)
