Posted on 03/14/2005 3:34:33 AM PST by Swordmaker
IT ISN'T!
Here we go AGAIN. Sigh.
This was published in November 2004... where are all the attacks, Bush? Where are all the compromised Macs? We went around the bush about this in November... and it was pointed out that for this to even be installed REQUIRES ROOT LEVEL ACCESS! In addition, it has to be a willful act of installation... it cannot install itself without administrator action.
You are spreading FUD again, Bush. Proof:
This so called "worm" is a script that has to be installed by an administrator. Its comments even say so:# This script runs in bash (as is noted by the very first line of this script)
# To install this script you need admin access or
# physical access (boot from a CD or firewire/usb, ignore permissions on the internal drive) or
# write access to either /Library/StartupItems /System/Library/StartupItems or
# write access to any existing StartupItem (which you can then replace with this script) or
# write access to the rc, crontab, or periodic files (and have them run or install the script) or
# you could trick someone who has an admin account into installing it.
# It should go in /System/Library/StartupItems or /Library/StartupItems (when it is executed it
# will move itself to /System/Library/StartupItems)That's not a worm. It's not even a trojan, because a trojan implies you installing something bad that you thought was something else. The only use for this is when someone has physical access to your machine. It is, in fact, more of a root kit than anything else, though it really doesn't go very far with that either.
This is just nonsense FUD.
You know, Bush, this gets tiresome... you like bringing up these FALSE rumors of security holes for the Macintosh DESPITE having been told (and shown) that they are not what you claim.
The purpose originally for Windows was to be an un-networked, one-user, non-multitasking machine with no security architecture at all. They later made NT to be multi-user, networked and multitasking but they used the API model from the un-networked, no-security Windows when they did it.
Contrast that with Mac, which is based on an OS that was born with networking (the first to include a TCP/IP stack, which Microsoft later cribbed), multi-user and security in mind. It was designed to run mainframes so it had to have all that.
I can tell you from experience that Macs are popular in Germany. But that doesn't mean much -- what really counts is that BSD is very popular around the world. If you can find a BSD hack, you can likely translate that into a Mac hack.
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