i Caramba!
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
My Finnish friends at F-Secure have told me that their security research labs have taken delivery of a proof-of-concept sample for an AdWare application. Nothing particularly exciting or unusual about that, you might think, but if I tell you that it is an AdWare application that targets Mac OS X would you perhaps change your mind?
Bearing in mind, as a proof-of-concept code sample this is still in the realms of theoretical threat, there is no danger out in the wild. Yet. But given that it exploits a combination of the ease of use of a Mac and no Administrator rights in order to attach itself to your user account and then subsequently every application you use, that danger could be very real unless Apple do something drastic to fix the underlying weaknesses in OS X that allow a System Library to be installed without prompting the end user.
Sensibly, F-Secure are not revealing the precise methods used by the iAdware code, after all they are in the prevention not scare-mongering business (although it can often be a close call as far as security firms are concerned.) However, F-Secure did tell me that an Administrator could easily install iAdware globally for every user, as all it requires to do its stuff is Copy permissions. In their testing, the guys at the lab say the code sample managed to launch the Mac web browser client successfully for every application they used.
File under interesting rather than highly risky for now, but let it at least wipe the smug grin off the faces of the Apple Advocates who insist that their platform is impenetrable when it comes to such things. AdWare may not be a Windows based problem alone for very much longer…
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