Archives for May 2011

Apple finally admits to the MacDefender scareware and puts out instructions on how to prevent it. Too bad that within a couple of days there was a new variant that makes the instructions obsolete.

Ed Bott continues to report on this on his Microsoft Blog over on ZDNet, and to much hatred from the Mac Fanbois. They still deny the whole thing. It does not matter that Apple has confirmed the malware. It does not matter that Intego, a Mac Security blog is the one finding these items. No, the Mac is uber-secure and there is no malware for it. Malware for the Mac is impossible to create. Well, the new version reported by Intego doesn’t require any administrator password. This to me seems to be no longer any proof of concept, but a real threat. But I digress. The biggest problem in this situation are the Mac Fanbois who are denying this sort of malware exists. The whole argument they give though reminds me of something else in history, that happened almost 100 years ago.

There was a ship built in the early 20th century in England, which was highly lauded. This ship was huge, luxurious and was unsinkable. That is correct, the claimed nothing could sink this ship, no way, no how, don’t even ponder the notion, it can’t happen. Well, there is nothing wrong with calling something unsinkable, of course until it met a friendly iceberg in the North Atlantic on April 15, 1912. The iceberg decided to give the ship a nice bump, tore open a huge gash, and caused a lot of people to perish as the ship sank. We all know the name of the ship, it lives on. Titanic.

I look at claims of the Titanic, and the blindness that the builders of it had, and see similarities to the reaction of Mac Fanbois to Ed Bott and the MacDefender malware. Denial, short sightedness, and unwilling to admit the problem. Actually, this also reminds me of Microsoft when it first started getting hit big time with malware.

There are many arguments in this whole scenario that can be taken in. Yes, its a socially engineered piece of malware, but so are the majority of ones written fro Microsoft. Yes one piece of malware like this does not an epidemic make. Yet, the Mac community has a chance to learn from the past, realized that they are starting to be targeted, and get ahead of the rolling stone that could be coming at them. Denial only hurts them.

Oh, and just one more piece of history on the whole, you need administrative privilege for the malware to become installed. Last time I checked, OSX was written on top of a BSD Unix variant. There have been viruses for Unix for a lot longer than Mac or Windows.