A recent trend in Mac news has been the susceptibility of Macs to attack. One of the antivirus software developers will warn of upcoming threats to the platform. This will be follow by some security expert making the same prediction. Finally, someone will report their Mac has been compromised, but the account will be light on details. It seems to me that everyone wants to be the first to bring bad news.
The latest account comes via the very democratic MacInTouch, wherein reports from all over the Mac community are published. This democracy comes at a price of sometimes questionable truth. The user reports being infected by Linux.RST.B, aka ELF_RST.B. However, his symptoms don’t really match up with recorded behavior.
However, this diagnosis is based upon an alert by Norton Antivirus, whose weak heuristics, have identified clean swap files as being infected by Hacker.Underhand. Further updates to the story yielded the lesson that using weak passwords with an exposed SSH service opens your machine up to attack, regardless of platform. We shouldn’t all be in a such a hurry to find security issues with OS X. It may happen, but we don’t get a prize for being first across the finish line.
[via MacSlash]
