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> I've been waiting for someone to tweak to that sentence.

Dayglored to the rescue!

Your explanation makes sense. I had a vague >6-yr-old recollection of WMP being spun for the Mac, but Microsoft quite clearly stopped all work on it long ago.

My guess is that this malware exploited some ancient hole in WMP, and since WMP had at once time been available for the Mac, the bald-faced liars at Sophos claimed it was a current Mac virus. What a load of crap.

BTW, here's what Wikipedia says about the Mac OS-X release of WMP:

Version 9 was the final version of Windows Media Player to be released for Mac OS X before development was cancelled by Microsoft. Developed by the Windows Media team at Microsoft instead of the Macintosh Business Unit and released in 2003, on release the application lacked many basic features that were found in other media players such as Apple's iTunes and QuickTime.[citation needed] It also lacked support for many media formats that version 9 of the Windows counterpart supported on release 10 months earlier.
The Mac version supported only Windows Media encoded media (up to version 9) enclosed in the ASF format, lacking support for all other formats such as MP4, MPEG, and Microsoft's own AVI format. On the user interface front, it did not prevent screensavers from running during playback, it did not support file drag-and-drop, nor did it support playlists. While Windows Media Player 9 had added support for some files that use the WMV9 codec (also known as the WMV3 codec by the FourCC), in other aspects it was seen as having degraded in features from previous versions.
On January 12, 2006 Microsoft announced it had ceased development of Windows Media Player for Mac.[20] Microsoft now distributes a third-party plugin called WMV Player (produced and maintained by Flip4Mac) which allows some forms of Windows Media to be played within Apple's QuickTime player and other QuickTime-aware applications.[21]

It's dead, Jim. Long dead.