[AppleChic]

The antivirus vendor Intego reveals that they've discovered a new Trojan horse that is being carried by pirated copies of iWork '09 circulating on a number of sites.

Intego has classified the Trojan as a "serious" risk and named it OSX.Trojan.iServices.A. The Trojan allows a malicious user to connect to an infected machine and perform any number of functions and download additional software to the machine.

Intego explains:

"This software is installed as a startup item (in /System/Library/StartupItems/iWorkServices, a location reserved normally for Apple startup items), where it has read-write-execute permissions for root. The malicious software connects to a remote server over the Internet; this means that a malicious user will be alerted that this Trojan horse is installed on different Macs, and will have the ability to connect to them and perform various actions remotely. The Trojan horse may also download additional components to an infected Mac."

Intego reports that tens of thousands of people are still pirating the iWork '09 package on some sites despite the knowledge of the Trojan.

However there are now instructions on how to deactivate the Trojan. They are:

" 1) (open Terminal.app)
2) sudo su (enter password)
3) rm -r /System/Library/StartupItems/iWorkServices
4) rm /private/tmp/.iWorkServices
5) rm /usr/bin/iWorkServices
6) rm -r /Library/Receipts/iWorkServices.pkg
7) killall -9 iWorkServices"

MacScan has also released a free utility to remove the Trojan.

This Trojan looks like it is the first real OS X Trojan to advance beyond the proof-of-concept or pranking stages and really cause some trouble…guess Apple can't say OSX is bug free anymore.

Source: iWork '09 Torrent Carrying OS X Trojan [Updated] - Mac Rumors

[prism2unit]

BLASPHEMY! lol, well it was bound to happen right? more and more people getting macs means that hackers see Macs as potential targets now...

Bummer >.<

[D to the M]

Agreed. One of my selling points to my friends is that macs don't get virus. Guess you shouldnt pirate software!

[fletch33]

well at least it wasn't a virus because then i would have to start thinking about anti-virus for my mac.

a trojan on a mac is nothing new out there. just ask any of the porn site maniacs on macs

[tha5150]

now now there mr fletch. non of that.

[oscar25]

How can it be an OSX problem if its a pirated software? Guess that's the risk of running pirated software.

[E-Dragon]

Good thing no one here uses pirated software.... Mac or otherwise....

[wohhey]

This sucks. I downloaded iWork and read that warning. I didnt know that is there a troijan or not. So i did exactly what they sad in intego AND my whole Mac OSX crashed and failed to restart. I installed it again, good that i had timemachine copy. Intego sucks

[JAG2621]

Originally Posted by D to the M

Agreed. One of my selling points to my friends is that macs don't get virus. Guess you shouldnt pirate software!

Mac's don't get a virus unless the user installed it! Macs are still not prone to get a virus its just the users installing it trying to save money. They all desevre it for trying to pirate software. Anyone on any OS can get a virus if they install it.

[tha5150]

Originally Posted by JAG2621

Mac's don't get a virus unless the user installed it!

hahahhah

[scidsecret]

...Guess that's what you get for pirating software! iWork really isn't that much... like $100?

[Nick Z]

Good for them mac users, thinking there invincible. I've run pirated programs for years on my PCs and never been infected with a virus. I say it's all user mistakes. If you don't know what your doing when downloading anything period your at risk for getting a virus.

[tivoselecta]

ANY virus needs a person to install it, regardless of platform- that's the definition of a virus. Therefore Macs, Linux boxes and PCs are just as likely to get them. Mac has thus far been "immune" only by dint of the fact that people didn't write Mac viruses as they got a bigger bang for their buck by writing a win32 virus.

Worms spread independently of human intervention due to weaknesses in the operating system. We like to think that we're immune to them on Macs, but again, this is just because we've not been attacked, not because MacOS is immune-- remember how we jailbroke 1.1.1? We went to a website that loaded a pic, and sloppy coding of the decompression routine allowed us to take control of the system. Funny how we can find operating system vulnerabilities when we really try.

This software is really more of a Trojan horse. It's run because you think it's a useful piece of software, but it's not.

Whatever you think about pirated software, as Apple gets more and more of a share of the OS market, this thing is going to be more and more common. Macs can get viruses, worms and Trojans, and I think we're going to see more and more of them in the future.

[reznor9]

Here is how I was explained about the differences between mac and pc and how much easier it is to infect a pc.

I was told that PCs share resources with one another, so in essence, a large amount of your apps will use the same files and drivers to function... kind of like they have a central hub which contains alot of resources which many apps use.. when you boot that app, it goes to the main hub and pulls that file and returns it to the main hub... same goes for all other apps.

On a mac, all these programs are self contained... thats why they only have one icon in the mobile finder(in which all the apps files are bundled into). They are packages to pretty much work on their own with all necessary resources so they can work without having to borrow any.

Now if someone wants to write a virus on a PC, they only have to infect one of these shared files that other apps tend to use, and as this one infected file interacts with another file the app uses, and it gets pulled to work with another app, it too will become infected and it will go back and forth while being accessed by this app and this one and will spread like crazy all over the operating system.

Now on a mac, if you infect this one file, since it doesn't leave the app bundle it will be pretty much contained. So all you have to do to get rid of it is to uninstall the app.

The PC seems to be full of malicious and destructive viruses.
The only viruses Ive seen on the Mac are like spyware viruses, that will allow access to your system, but cant actually disrupt your OS.

Please note that is is what I was told by the mac genius that sold me my mac book. I'm not claiming to be a tech genius or anything so if I'm dead wrong then so be it.

MAC RULES!

[prodigy]

lol, there are viruses for all operating systems. The only difference is when looking at a scale of security being rated 1 to usability being a 10 the Windows operating system is damn close to 10, which the more usability you have the more security flaws you have as well.
There are about 60 viruses I think total that are live right now for linux/unix/Mac and most of them don't do anything serious either because the security of a unix based system means writing a virus for it is very difficult, requires you to be very code proficient. There are hundreds of thousands of Windows viruses and worms and plenty malicious because it's so simple to write. The worm that stopped the internet for a whole day in 2000 just took advantage of a simple flaw in a mail protocol instead of using I think 7 characters it required 32 were used making computers keep signalling to get mail info and turning them into spewing zombies. It even hit Microsoft's own servers and was proven that it hit them too, lol but they patched their servers and denied it.Hackers use Linux and don't want to soil their own sandbox so-to-speak. Basically, Linux users just know how to use a computer generally with broad knowledge on systems. Windows users are targeted because they mostly know nothing or have very little knowledge on using a terminal or really using a computer. Easy, mass target area of fools.