Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Warning about offers of "Osama Pictures"

Or pictures of his dead wife, or videos of the exercise ...

There's a big increase in Spam using these sorts of things as teasers ("bait", really).  Of course, the link takes you to a site that feed you malware.

And a new wrinkle is that this warning now applies to Macintosh owners:
Crimeware kits have become a ubiquitous part of the malware scene in the last few years, but they have mainly been confined to the Windows platform. Now, reports are surfacing that the first such kit targeting Apple's Mac OS X operating system has appeared.

The kit is being compared to the Zeus kit, which has been one of the more popular and pervasive crimeware kits for several years now. A report by CSIS, a Danish security firm, said that the OS X kit uses a template that's quite similar to the Zeus construction and has the ability to steal forms from  Firefox.
Macs may still be somewhat more resistant to the worst sorts of trojan horse programs (may be - Windows 7 and IE 8 are considerably improved, security-wise).  But Apple's market share has grown big enough to get them on the Bad Guy's radar screen.

So a word to the wise - ignore this sort of anonymous Spam.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

weird that obama wanted to release Guantanamo Bay pictures while bush was in office, but a graphic photo of a dead osama is 'not who we are.'