Come back often for updated tips & hints on using your Mac
A follow-up to the previous postings about the MAC Defender malware exploit. I came across this on a client's iMac on May 16th. They called me to describe what was happening and it sounded identical to what I described in the previous postings and the email blast I sent out to clients warning about this problem. Fortunately, they did not supply their credit card info to the bogus software that promised to combat the attacking viruses, worms & trojan horses that, in fact, were not present. One thing that had changed was the name was now MAC Protector, not MAC Defender. The "bad guys" were changing the name to throw people off. (It turns out that several of the "Receipts" installed on the computer still had the Defender name embedded in the code). I installed Virus Barrier X6 on their iMac and all is good. Today, Apple acknowledged this threat and is going to release a software update to take care of all the "variants" of MAC Defender, see the following link from the Apple support site, http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4650. This is all well and good but, as I've said before, I believe that this type of occurrence is unfortunately going to become more common in the future. But who knows what the future holds? The software update will cover the MAC Defender threat but I recommend getting proactive and installing something like VirusBarrier X6 or some other anti-malware protection that looks for all known types of malware exploits.
AHOY!
"Forewarned is forearmed; to be prepared is half the victory." --Miguel de Cervantes
Updated May 7, 2011
A brief update to my last posting on the MAC Defender malware warning.
First, a word about a legitimate website, www.macdefender.org, that has suffered the pains of being wrongly accused in all the confusion by outraged Mac users as being the source of the MAC Defender malware. It has been a case of guilt by association by only sharing a very similar name. The owner of this legitimate website has temporarily taken the English version of the site down because of all the threatening email he has received. It is unfortunate that the true culprits continue to be scamming for victims while an innocent victim has suffered the loss of their good name for their presence on the web. In addition, they have wrongly been attacked by outraged Mac users that didn't fully investigate before letting loose their misdirected fury. One of the downsides to our fast-paced, Internet times in which we live. Maybe that could be another future post, but I digress.
For those of you wondering, here is a link to one of Apple's official pronouncements on the Mac platform's susceptibility to viruses and malware, (courtesy of the mac360.com website), http://www.apple.com/macosx/security/. I will add one additional way to make Safari more secure by changing the default setting that affects the automatic opening of "safe" files after Safari downloads them. All it involves is unchecking a checkbox (see below) found on the Safari preferences, General tab. A "safe" file could be a .jpg, .pdf, Quicktime movie file, .dmg or other compressed archive file. I know, some of you are wondering if this is over-kill in doing this. In the future, one of these file types could well contain a mischievous, or worse, payload that was crafted by the bad-guys to cause problems for your Mac. I'm not saying it will happen, but that it just may happen in a similar manner. This just makes it so you must double-click on it to open instead of it opening automatically.
There are others of you who might be reading this and saying that I am leaving out other types of potential exploits that will require no user intervention to execute. That, I will leave for readers to investigate if they choose to do so. There are many web-sites that can be referenced regarding the complex and ever-changing topic of computer security. See http://www.precisesecurity.com/, (a web-site devoted to security of computers and mobile devices), http://www.cert.org/homeusers/HomeComputerSecurity/, (An outdated document that contains many useful things to think about), http://www.sans.org/reading_room/, (Many white papers covering a multitude of general computer security topics).
Updated May 4, 2011
People often ask me how I keep abreast of the rapidly shifting technology landscape as it pertains to all things Apple. I subscribe to a few Apple-centric mailing lists and blogs that either get sent to my email inbox or I've bookmarked in my web browser and visit frequently. I'll add a few to the end of this post.
Today, I will mention one mailing list specifically because it is geared more for the investment and financial side of Apple and less technically oriented. But today, 5/4/2011, it offered some good advice about the growing threat to the Mac platform from something known as malware. Malware has been a source of pain for Windows users for many years. If you want a more exhaustive definition of malware visit the wikipedia site here. The mailing list is the 'Apple 2.0' list that is published via 'CNNMoney.com/Fortune Online' website and maintained by Philip Elmer-DeWitt. Follow the link here to visit the web page for this specific posting about malware and the Mac platform. If you like what you read at 'Apple 2.0' you can sign up for the newsletter here and choose the Apple 2.0 newsletter. Whenever he has a new post you'll get it delivered to your email inbox.
My next post will follow up this topic with my specific thoughts about antivirus software and why I think it is necessary. Until then, I leave you with several additional links to learn more about all things Apple.
- TidBITS: Mac news for the rest of us http://db.tidbits.com/
- AppleInsider: Apple Insider News and Analysis http://www.appleinsider.com/
- Apple Support: Especially Forums, or what are now called Communities http://www.apple.com/support/
Ahoy,
Cain