Apple, Expecting Attacks on Lion, Moves to Foil the Jackals
On the heels of a newly discovered Trojan targeting Mac OS X, Apple is taking pre-emptive action to protect its soon-to-be released Lion operating system from future threats.
On Feb. 26, analysts at the security firm Sophos found a Trojan, called “OSX/MusMinim-A,” hiding malicious software rigged specifically to allow a hacker to remotely attack Apple’s popular OS X operating system.
The Trojan -- a variant of a popular Windows Trojan called "darkComet" -- allows a hacker to run arbitrary commands on infected computers, and could be used to trick users into entering personal information on fake "administrator password" phishing pages, Sophos said.
The "MusMinim" Trojan even directly addresses its victims, Sophos said. One of its tactics is to display a full-screen page on a targeted computer that forces the user to reboot. On that page, there is text that reads: "I am a Trojan Horse, so i have infected your Mac Computer. I know, most people think Macs can't be infected, but look, you ARE Infected! I have full controll [sic] over your Computer and i can do everything I want, and you can do nothing to prevent it. So, I'm a very new Virus, under Development, so there will be much more functions when im [sic] finished."
Also on Feb. 26, Apple shipped a beta version of OS X 10.7 -- also known as Lion -- to a number of security researchers months ahead of Lion's summer release date. According to the blog Edible Apple, Apple is enlisting the early help of the security community because it wants to ensure that Apple’s next operating system is equipped to combat the security threats that are sure to arise as the company’s market share grows.
To date, Mac users have remained relatively unscathed by computer crime simply because criminals have been putting their time and effort into targeting Windows machines, which dominate the computer market.
As the balance shifts, however, security experts believe the attacks will follow.
“As hackers become more sophisticated, malware is increasingly becoming OS-independent. As a result, Apple needs to devote a lot more attention to system security, and recent moves over the past few months indicate that Apple is up for the challenge,” Edible Apple writes.
Earlier this year, Apple hired David Rice a computer security expert from the U.S. Navy and the National Security Agency, to be its director of global security.
