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First Scareware For the Mac

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 15, @06:29PM
from the rogue-cleaning-tool dept.
Security Apple
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property sends us news from F-Secure of what they claim is the first rogue cleaning tool for the Mac. MacSweeper is a Mac version of Cleanator, hosted from a colo somewhere in the Ukraine. The article points out that the company's About page is lifted verbatim from Symantec's site. With the Mac's market share closing in on double digits, perhaps it's not surprising to see the platform targeted with crapware as PCs have been for years. The F-Secure author adds as a footnote that a journalist said to him something you don't hear every day: "I visited the macsweeper.com website. I know I probably shouldn't have but I used a Windows PC so I knew I wouldn't get infected."

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Firehose:First Rogue Cleaning Tool for the Mac by Anonymous Coward
[+] Hardware: iPhone Trojan Sign of Things to Come? 149 comments
climber writes "Just days after the first scareware for OSX, researchers are pondering the problems of an iPhone exploit that could lead to larger issues. The Trojan pulls legitimate apps off the phone if you try to remove it, but it only infects iPhones that have 'been modified or opened through a security hole in the system.' Though this worm is more of an annoyance than anything else, it could be a proof of concept for a more serious attack. 'The fear is hackers may be experimenting and gathering research that will increase the dangers of a more malicious attack in the near future. It is clear at least one writer -- the author of this piece at Web Worker Daily -- thinks that the iPhone should be left on the dresser in the morning. She offers several reasons that the device isn't a good corporate tool.'"
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  • gamespot gave it 11 out of 10 (Score:5, Funny)

    by User 956 (568564) on Tuesday January 15, @06:34PM (#22059428) Homepage
    With the Mac's market share closing in on double digits, perhaps it's not surprising to see the platform targeted with crapware as PCs have been for years.

    I didn't realize Kane & Lynch had been announced for the Mac platform

  • Not the smartest journo (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MLCT (1148749) on Tuesday January 15, @06:34PM (#22059430)
    The journalist should have visited using a linux livecd. If the site hosts mac malware then it is a pretty good bet they already have established "businesses" in the field of windows malware.

  • Isn't any "cleaning tool" rogue on a mac? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15, @06:38PM (#22059482)
    The category of "cleaning tools" was rather dodgy even before the trojaned ones started showing up. The notion that getting infected by god knows what, running a little wizard, and being all ok again is insane. Both the notion that one can reliably detect malware that has already had time to romp with your system and the idea that infection is so routine that there should be tools to be run every few days for it are pretty gross.

    And now we have an example of this fine species showing up on a platform that doesn't really have malware. How could anybody trust a cleaner for a platform that doesn't, as yet, need cleaning?

  • fixed that for you (Score:5, Funny)

    by joeyspqr (629639) on Tuesday January 15, @06:45PM (#22059564) Homepage
    "I visited the macsweeper.com website. I know I probably shouldn't have but I used a Mac so I knew I wouldn't get infected."

    oh wait ...

  • Yeah and moon is made from.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fri13 (963421) on Tuesday January 15, @06:46PM (#22059590)

    What, you need to download something to your mac and then INSTALL it?

    This kind software has be there long time ago and there is nothing new to see here.
    Market share is still smaller than GNU/Linux and it is not having this kind problems, wait, it has.

    Come back again when F-secure and others have proof for worm or virus what works like windows platform, automatically.

    • Re:Yeah and moon is made from.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by willyhill (965620) <pr8wak @ g m ail.com> on Tuesday January 15, @07:23PM (#22060050) Homepage
      Come back again when you understand how Windows machines are largely compromised. Crapware vendors don't need to wait for the next IE vulnerability to target people, all they need is social engineering and lack of common sense. The last few major botnet herding attacks have been perpetrated like that. The fastest-spreading worms have been perpetrated like that. Coming a close second is exploiting vulnerabilities that people can't be bothered to patch. Yet all of this has somehow become Microsoft's fault, but in this case I guess it's the user's fault, right?

      Idiocy can and will spread happily across platform boundaries. It really does not matter what OS you are using. And this article proves it. It's just that until now Windows was losing by the weight of sheer numbers. It has more vulnerabilities, sure. But those are irrelevant to the people who make big $$$ compromising machines. They simply don't need them.

      • Re:Yeah and moon is made from.. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by postbigbang (761081) on Tuesday January 15, @08:01PM (#22060416)
        Your comment is somewhat disingenuous. For argument sake you can cite that there are probably an equal number of stupid people buying Macs and PCs, by percentage.

        Now take a look at the architectures. A dozen years of Windows since Win95 has only progressively made Windows more secure, and while better than before, still full of a superfluity of exploits (for differing reasons, again, not counting user "stupidity"). You have to do a lot of work to iteratively get past the gatekeepers in both operating systems; it's not as trivial an exercise as it once was; all the really wide-open machines are 0w3d by someone by now.... as part of a botnet.

        Given a 5-10% of the market for Apple, depending on whom you believe, you're only now seeing a MacOS ruse. Think about that for a moment. Think about both motive and opportunity. Motive we understand. Opportunity hasn't been very strong until now. The weapon? Two decades in to desktop operating systems (three if you count CP/M, UCSD Pascal and so on) we're only now seeing a MacOS exploit. A common denominator among the exploitable: stupidity. Now let's scratch off stupidity and talk about architecture. It's not Microsoft's fault that they used a root-level database (the 'Registry') that could be twigged by any user-mode app in pre-XP SP2? Hmmmm. Or the mindless ways that people found to explode IE? Or the TCP/IP stack? Or how long it took to get a WEP-128 parser and still longer for a WPA parser? Microsoft's sloppy code created an industry, one to fix the code, and another to exploit it. They didn't take security seriously, then paid it only lipservice. They're paying the price in disrespect for not being respectable!

  • double digits? (Score:5, Funny)

    by BeanThere (28381) on Tuesday January 15, @07:26PM (#22060074)
    There are now 10 or more Mac users?

  • First Scareware? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Macrat (638047) on Tuesday January 15, @07:28PM (#22060102)
    I thought Symantec released the first Scareware for Macs?

  • Contact Us page changed already (Score:5, Informative)

    by caseih (160668) on Tuesday January 15, @07:29PM (#22060108)
    Looks like they read slashdot. Their "Contact Us" page is already edited now to remove the text copied from Symantec. Now the page doesn't say much of anything at all. No phone numbers, no addresses. Just a bare e-mail address. Hard to believe how scam artists can operate out in the open these days.

  • Hi i'm MacSweeper Developer, listen to me (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MacSweeper (1220668) on Tuesday January 15, @09:42PM (#22061472)
    I would like to explain all the situation, about MacSweeper. We are really trying to make a good software, and you wont find any viruses/spyware/trojans/malware in MacSweeper (test it your self, if you don't believe me, you can use any type of firewalls, dissemblers, or other tools) . The problem is that we are using selling partners that forces us to use this marketing type. We would like to leave them, we don't want to completely destroy Good Name of MacSweeper application.
    Personally I adore Mac Platform, and it hearts to here that the program you wrote is said to be some kind of "Rogue application" , i wouldn't like to destroy good manners of software written for it :((
    I would like to say sorry for all inconveniences that we could bring to you, but believe MacSweeper is meant to be a useful application.

    You can ask Questions, and i will try to answer them! Thank You!

    • Re:the shit hits the fan! (Score:5, Informative)

      by necro2607 (771790) on Tuesday January 15, @06:46PM (#22059600)
      Yeah the difference is, you can't get spyware installed on a Mac by clicking a banner ad in a browser. The software doesn't even have permission to do software installation, so it would be asking for a password (unless some unknown vulnerability is exploited). Frankly if you're entering your password for your computer when some arbitrary website asks for it, you've already got have way worse problems than spyware on your Mac.

      • Re:the shit hits the fan! (Score:5, Informative)

        by sqlrob (173498) on Tuesday January 15, @06:57PM (#22059746)
        It doesn't take special permissions to put stuff in ~/Applications. It's not done by default, but some users do do it, and Finder supports it.

        Or heck, just put it on the desktop where the user can click it. No special permissions needed. Most .Apps don't need an installer, nor need to be in /Applications.

        • Re:the shit hits the fan! (Score:5, Insightful)

          by jmauro (32523) on Tuesday January 15, @07:12PM (#22059918) Homepage
          But the Applications folder does not run as root, but as the regular user. The malware can only screw up the current users session, it cannot access or modify anything that needs root permissions without asking for the root password. Without root, malware is annoying, but not difficult to get rid of.

          • Re:the shit hits the fan! (Score:5, Insightful)

            by GaryPatterson (852699) on Tuesday January 15, @07:18PM (#22060000)
            Yes, but if you ask a user what they care more about - the OS or their data - you'll find few who care that they'll have to reinstall the OS. It's an irritant, but easily replaced from the source media.

            Our data is far more critical, making the ~/Applications folder (or the ~/Desktop folder) a dangerous place for executables.

            Of course, in these enlightened days we all have regular backups now or Time-Machine-enabled external drives. Hmm...

    • Re:Wait, why would you even use this? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by NewbieProgrammerMan (558327) on Tuesday January 15, @07:01PM (#22059800)
      Well, assuming Apple's market share is increasing (which I don't know for sure, just taking it as a given for making my point), some significant fraction of those new Mac owners are former PC owners. Many of these people will assume that all the crapware they "needed" for their Windows machine is just part of owning a computer. It's not that there's a problem with a Mac, it's that a lot of people just don't know any better.

        • Re:Oh no! (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Tsiangkun (746511) on Tuesday January 15, @07:48PM (#22060282) Homepage
          I'd prefer to focus on the ZERO self propagating pieces of malware in the wild.

          • Re:Oh no! (Score:5, Insightful)

            by bigstrat2003 (1058574) on Tuesday January 15, @08:40PM (#22060786)
            Doesn't matter. Stupid users trump all possible security measures (except locking them out of the system for their own good, which isn't really feasible), and there's no shortage of them. Until the programmers can prevent stupid users from infecting their systems, it doesn't matter how damn many malware samples there are in the wild, and you have no right to be smug about the security of your OS.

        • Re:Oh no! (Score:5, Interesting)

          by webmaster404 (1148909) on Tuesday January 15, @08:46PM (#22060866)
          No, it has a couple of advantages.

          1. Privileges, an ordinary user can't mess up the entire system. Unless the user is *really* stupid, they are not root and therefore do not have Write privileges on system-critical files. So even if you ran "rm -rf /" as a normal user, you would only lose the files you had access to and not break the system.

          2. Most software is installed through a repository. Now, I realize that Mac does not by default (although there are projects to port apt-get and the like to it) but most distros of Linux have a way of installing via the repository.

          3. Most first-party OS-X software is at least partly open-source including the key components of the OS such as the Kernel, Browser rendering engine, and some of the other utilities. This adds a layer of protection to prevent programming errors from not being noticed as anyone can look at the code and submit fixes to it. In addition, this adds security by having parts of Safari being looked at to prevent such flaws as drive-by-downloads which were a major problem of IE and a reason many Windows users got infected by malware.

          While it is true that if someone really wanted to mess up OS-X or were just plain stupid they could. However, the chances of Unix breaking from normal usage are far far smaller then those of Windows.
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