There’s been a lot of excitement today about a Trojan targeting Macintosh computers. There is some excellent in depth coverage over at Macworld, but I wanted to hit on some highlights for people who have been asking me about this.
First, don’t panic. Even if the high end estimates are true, about 600,000 macs are infected, which amounts to about 1% of all the Mac users out there. By those percentages, I would still carry on being a great deal more worried about a great deal many more things, such as your backup plan.
That being said, unlike 99% of all the other scares out there, this one is real in the sense that by visiting the wrong website (apparently, a lot of them are ones ending in a .nu domain – which I must admit, I’ve never even seen. Still, a lot of times those incredibly aggravating pop up windows that shady websites pop up for you lead to funkypants domains) you can become infected, and not even know it. The malware does give a few clues that something is up – upon installing itself within your user folder, it will pretend to run Software Update and ask for your administrator password, so it can gain wider access to the rest of the system. Even if you are savvy enough to deny it (and remember, always ask yourself, why is something suddenly asking for my password? Is this what I expected, and a normal part of my computer routine?), it will still install itself and run in a more limited, but still threatening, capacity.