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Comment by noelchurchill | Hacker News Reader

Ugh it's finally happened.

There's been serious malware on the mac for ages. You have to be doing some really stupid things to get it, e.g. illegally downloading software, several porn sites do it, etc.,

It looks as if it's now requiring much less stupidity to get malware on the mac, but that's really all that's changed. Email scams are now considering the fact that I might be using a mac.

If I remember correctly, this isn't the first OS X trojan by any means.

Yesterday I spent several hours going through discussions.apple.com and collecting requests for help from Mac users who have been affected by this issue. I found more than 200 separate discussion threads, many of them from people who have been tricked into installing this software and are desperately trying to remove it. It started with four posts on April 30; this past weekend there were 42 unique, new discussion threads on this subject.

I am not unfamiliar with Apple’s forums. I’ve done similar searches in the past, especially after reading some of those same posts that Gruber called out from 2008. I have never found more than one or two in-the-wild reports. This time, the volume is truly exceptional.

This appears to be the first widespread malware attack.

what, exactly, has finally happened?

Did you the article? Serious malware on the mac.

Woof: http://daringfireball.net/2011/05/wolf

His links to the Apple forums to "confirm" what a big deal this is:

"I have never found more than one or two in-the-wild reports. This time, the volume is truly exceptional."

I went to the forums and searched for Mac Defender, Apple Security, and Mac Protector and found a few dozen posts. Plenty of people posting straightforward solutions.

Definitely a nice piece of linkbait.

How is this new? http://macscan.securemac.com/spyware-list/

Thanks. That was sort of my point. That and the ambiguity in the answer I was responding too.

Permit me not to freak out over a trojan. There's no conceivable way to protect perfectly against self-install malware.

What? Yes there is. There are multiple solutions.

1. AV program catches the attempt, prevents the installation.

2. Much simpler from Apple's perspective: prevent installation from outside the App Store.

0 day?

I did, actually. Before I responded to you. Your comment was, however, thoroughly ambiguous. What "it"? Your response here doesn't exactly convince me to be more concerned than I was last week.

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