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Friday, January 23rd, 2009
| Time | Event |
| 9:49p | Trojan hitches ride on pirated Iwork Apple infected By Nick Farrell
A SECURITY COMPANY has warned that a pirated version of Apple's iWork 09 software is shipping with a trojan which could take control of the machine. While many Apple users think they are safe because there have been very few ways of distributing viruses to minority machines, Intego thinks that the malware writers might have hit on a good plan with what they have called OSX.Trojan.iServices.A. By sticking their Trojans into hot software, it can be guaranteed to find an Apple in the sea of PCs and there is a good chance that the owner knows another Apple user as they tend to hang out in 'smugs' [are you sure that is the collective noun for Apple users? The Trojan appears as a start-up item as a part of iWorkServices. It has read-write-execute permissions for root control of the computer, Intego said. The malware connects to a remote server over the Internet and allows more stuff to be loaded into the Mac. More than 20,000 cheapskates have downloaded the virus from several pirate sites rather than getting a kosher free 30-day demo from Apple or stumping up £69 for a full version. The only sure way for a Mac User to deal with the Trojan so far is to format the hard drive and re-install OSX. What is amusing is that the Apple press is insisting that it is not 'a virus' because Macs don't get them. Trojans are not the same thing as they cannot spread from one machine to another without help from a stupid user. Also they are denying that it will give anyone control of the machine, when the security advisory says otherwise. In fact the Trojan will do whatever its bot net rulers tell it to do. All they need to do is write a payload to do it. µ L'Inq
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| 10:33p | Kaspersky Lab reports a new malicious program for mobile phones that steals money from mobile accoun last week, Kaspersky Lab experts detected a new malicious program for Symbian that targets customers of an Indonesian mobile phone operator. The Trojan is written in Python, a script language. It sends SMS messages to a short number with instructions to transfer part of the money in the user’s account to another account, which belongs to the cybercriminals. There are five known variants of Trojan-SMS.Python.Flocker, from .ab to.af. The amounts transferred range from $0.45 to $0.90. Thus, if the cybercriminals behind the Trojan manage to infect a large number of phones, the amount transferred to their mobile phone account as a result could be quite substantial. "Obviously, the authors of the Trojan want to make money,” said Denis Maslennikov, a senior malware analyst at Kaspersky Lab. “It seems that the focus on financial fraud in the mobile malware industry will only get more pronounced over time. Until recently, many people thought that malicious programs that send SMS messages without the user’s knowledge were a purely Russian phenomenon. Now we can see that the problem no longer affects only Russian users - it’s becoming an international issue." Kaspersky Mobile Security users are protected from the new Trojan: the Kaspersky Lab product blocks malicious programs by not allowing them to run. Kaspersky Lab recommends users to exercise caution when using a smartphone to browse the Internet and to keep antivirus databases up-to-date.
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