Trojans Forever

The Apple Installer.app exploit seems here to stay.

Get It Try It

The Apple Installer.app exploit - seen in the iWorkServices trojan and now in the DivX trojan - seems here to stay. As if. It's so easy to implement and there'll always be a few idiots who never get a clue.

And watch the pro-Microsoft media get hold of this. This is just what they've been waiting for. Watch the phones ring hot. With calls from Redmond Washington. Nobody cares and nobody notices it's just a bunch of preteen morons causing all the damage and making the headlines. They'll spin it - just as Bill Gates tried to do during the Month of Apple Bugs.

'Nowadays security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day they come out with a total exploit. Your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on a Windows machine.'
 - Bill Gates January 2007

The Charles Coopers and the Rob Enderles and the Paul Thurrotts will come out of the woodwork. And what's the damage then? That fewer people will trust Apple? No! It's that people who were starting to get a clue about Microsoft Windows will be again hesitant to switch away.

And that will hold back the evolution of this thing called the Internet and that aggregate known as the human being.

Too Easy

As pointed out in the article 'Trojans for Nothing' these Apple Installer.app trojans are just too easy to craft - and evidently too easy to dupe Maccie idiots with. The developers of the current trojans aren't even used to using Apple developer tools. All they have to do is change a few lines in the source, rebuild, and reconfigure an Apple Installer.app 'MPKG' bundle with a plain text editor such as TextEdit.

Thirty minutes tops.

And as before there's no way to protect yourself against such exploits with software, with antivirus signature lists and tools, not even with Intego's suite. Credit goes to Intego for alerting about these trojans but their software is no solution. There are no signatures in trojans like this. There is only one thing that protects you against attacks of this kind.

Brains.

Look at them yo-yos!
 - M Knopfler

See Also
The Technological: 500,000 Viruses!
Developers Workshop: Trojans for Nothing
The Technological: 0.6143232 Hours of Windows Bugs