New Mac Trojan Installs Silently, No Password Required

[ThaiLife]

Update on July 26New Mac malware spies on you via Adium, Firefox, Safari, Skype

A new Mac OS X Trojan has been discovered that drops different components depending on whether or not it is executed on a user account with Admin permissions. The threat installs itself silently (no user interaction required) and also does not need your user password to infect your Apple Mac. The backdoor component calls home to the IP address 176.58.100.37 every five minutes, awaiting instructions.

Full Article Here

http://www.zdnet.com...red-7000001519/

[nikster]

sounds like the typical scare/ FUD article to me... as one expects by now from ZDNet.

Highlights:

- The trojan was not found on any machine out in the wild.

- The article never mentions how the trojan would get onto one's machine in the first place. I guess this implies the user must download the executable and run it.

Is it a silent drive by attack on the web browser that could be hiding on a malicious website? No it's not, otherwise they'd maybe have mentioned this. Saying that it doesn't require a password is kind of misleading, if technically true.

All in all if this is real at all - and I am skeptical there too - then it's most likely a research project or a beta version of something.

The main problem is that all those "security firms" that "find" those threats out in the wild are selling software to combat said, possibly imagined, threats. In short scare ware companies have a vested interest in generating FUD, and this one seems to me to be rather far into FUD territory.