[Swordmaker]

FUD!

Actually, neither of these is new... this is rehashed FUD about a well known Trojan Horse masquerading as a Video Codex (from early 2008) and the Tored-Fam was first observed in January... where it was attached to a "pirated" version of a FREE Beta (one that could be safely downloaded from Apple) of iWork'09 on two bit-torrent sites which reported that the downloads of the infected file were in "the dozens."

Although the two self pro-discoverers of the purpose of the imbedded malware—a couple of Symantec security wonks who did not even report their finding to their own employer, choosing instead to publish in The Virus Bulletin, an obscure $150/year subscription Blog—claimed in late May that the botnet was over 20,000 Macs large, no one has independently found an infected member of this Mac Raedbot in the wild. Even Symantec reports the threat as infecting 0-50 computers. Probably true because it includes the number ZERO.

Both require social engineering to trick the user into downloading them and installing them, giving administrator name and password, and ignoring warnings that the file is an executable.

[Swordmaker]

The first wave if post WWDC FUD is being presented... here is an example. The article claims NEW MALWARE but then only talks about already known trojan horse programs from 2008 and January 2009.
Mac FUD Ping!

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

Yeah, I was getting an odd sense of deja vu from this article. It seemed like old (and I mean really old) news.

And once again, you cannot infect a Mac just by connecting it to the Internet. You most assuredly can do so with (ahem) you-know-what OS— within minutes, in fact.

[Swordmaker]

“. . . two self pro-discoverers . . .” should read “. . . two self pro-claimed discoverers . . . “

[dayglored]

100% of the live (in-the-wild) Mac malware, and a large percentage of the live Windows malware, attack a vulnerability known as the USER.

0% of the Mac malware, and a large percentage of the Windows malware, attack a vulnerability known as the OPERATING SYSTEM.

That is, Windows, the OS, can be attacked without the USER doing anything. Mac OS cannot.

I am unaware of any Mac malware that does not require some action on the part of the USER to approve and permit the attack -- consciously.

That's a big difference. Tech writers are, as a group, ignorant asses when it comes to this sort of thing.

[GOP Poet]

bookmark

[Kitsunebi]

Of course it is old recycled FUD! Ad revenue is down so they had to dig up something eye catching and found this old stinking garbage.

[American_Centurion]

“Indeed, some of the people who may well have suffered a lot from those kind of attacks in the past [previous windows users] may be exactly the same kind of folk who visit the grubbier areas of the internet in the wee small hours of the morning. And they may feel that one of the side benefits of switching to a Mac is that they now don't have to worry about all of those nasty things while they're err.. watching nasty things.”

OMG! So now the Mac users who view "nasty things" are the ones who were previous Windows users......UGH...the snobbery in that statement is utterly sickening.

[JimRed]

It boggles the imagination to think that individuals sit at a computer terminal (probably in their mom’s basement) with the sole goal of doing harm to others.

They are too cowardly to “bully” face to face, so they do it that way. Public execution, anyone?