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Virus For Mac Arrives!

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Tuesday - February 21, 2006Safari struck by Zip security warning

By Macworld staff

A new security vulnerability in Safari has been identified by security experts at Secunia.

The company - which rates the flaw as âextremely criticalâ - says that the vulnerability was discovered by a source outside the company, Michael Lehn.

It can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system, it warns.

The vulnerability is caused by an error in the processing of file association meta data (stored in the "__MACOSX" folder) in ZIP archives.

âThis can be exploited to trick users into executing a malicious shell script renamed to a safe file extension stored in a ZIP archive,â Secunia warns.

It can also be exploited automatically by Safari when visiting a malicious website.

The company has released a test users can run to check if their system has been affected.

The vulnerability has been confirmed on an up-to-date system running Safari 2.0.3 (417.8) and Mac OS X 10.4.5.

Users can mitigate the threat by disabling the "Open safe files after downloading" option in Safari.


Source: http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/?Nage=1&pagePos=2

Not a virus per say but I figured I would throw it up since it relates to OSX security. Seems like something they'll be able to fix fairly quickly although who really knows. Hopefully they clear this up quickly and don't find any more vulnerabilities (I don't like when people act like OSX is infallible, but I don't want to see it getting attacked. Anything like this is bad regardless of whichn platform its on :S)

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YES! Now i could go "In yo face!!" at my cousin for saying there has been no known viruses for Macs at all. B) Still, it took a fairly long time for some hacker to have bothered to make a virus for the Mac. I don't see how it can be any more difficult than creating a virus for Windows. OSs are OSs, you can never change them. Its popularity that "gives" them the viruses. I've heard in BBC lately that Apple computers had a bug that hackers could tap into and basically hack the Mac with it. Apple "believes" that there has been no viruses out there yet that target the bug and is working on fixing it. I wonder what more problems would arise with the Mac...

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Like with any operating system, the more people use it the more security flaws/holes will be found. Yes the MacOS is more secure then the Windows operating system but there are 2 main reasons for this that I can see:1) Windows is written to be used by the general public, and has always been written so all you really have to know to use is is basic typing and knowing how to turn the box on.2) Home users don't want to have to remember alot of passwords or have the kids come and say "mom I want this game installed" after a long day at the office.Believe it or not I have more computers come across my tech bench due to the fact that the parents don't want to have to install software for their kids and this leads to massive virus/worm/trojen/adware/malware infestations and they are willing to pay $80+ USD to have someone clean it out once every 6 months or so then to have security.Windows based computers are designed for people that either don't know or don't want to know how to properly work with computers in a secure way and then complain about it to make themselves feel better. I know this isn't a popular point of view but after years of cleaning up systems for fun and for a living I have come to this unpopular opinion.

Edited by Logan Deathbringer (see edit history)

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