Re: Mac OS X no longer immune to viruses!

"Michael D. Ober" <obermd.@.alum.mit.edu.nospam> wrote:


OK - it was late and I was tired, so I don't remember which station or the
name of the professor. However, take a look at
http://secunia.com/advisories/19686/ for a Mac virus that doesn't require
the user enter the system password.

As Paul Sture points out, that article does not mention any specific
virus. I also post too late at night sometimes - the results are often
quite amusing :-)

As I had suspected, this was old news. I did some more googling and
found somee "less trimmed" versions of the AP story. If we are talkng
about the same person, which I doubt, it was Benjamin Daines, who was
"hit" by Oompa-Loompa (a.k.a. Leap.A, or Oomp-A) in mid-February - see
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/04/30/apple.security.ap/ for reference.
Daines is a British chemical engineer, not a comp sci professor in
Boulder.

Anyway, this is also the case the OP was referring to.

From http://www.ambrosiasw.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=102379 you can
read the following:

You cannot be infected by this unless you do all of the following:

1) Are somehow sent (via email, iChat, etc.) or download the
"latestpics.tgz" file

2) Double-click on the file to decompress it

3) Double-click on the resulting file to "open" it

....and then for non-Admin users, it fails to infect most applications.

You *cannot* simply "catch" the virus. Even if someone does send you the
"latestpics.tgz" file, you cannot be infected unless you unarchive the
file, and then open it.

In my book that constitutes, not a virus, not even a worm, but a Trojan.
There's more at the Ambosia board ...

--
I recommend Macs to my friends, and Windows machines
to those whom I don't mind billing by the hour
.

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