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January 4, 2008

security

SecureMac releases a free utility to eradicate the DNS changing Trojan horse

Posted Jan. 4, ’08, 2:25 PM PT by Aayush Arya
Category | Security

Trojan WarriorA couple of months ago, a dangerous benign little trojan hit the web that caused an uproar. It generated a lot of headlines and garnered as much attention as the presidential election. Why, you ask? Because it had the potential to successfully exploit Mac users. Viruses and Trojan horses, mainstays in the Windows world, have long been a rarity on Mac OS X.

The Trojan horse appeared on several pornographic websites disguised as a video codec. When you downloaded a video from one of those websites, it wouldn’t play unless you downloaded and installed the codec. As soon as you hit the fateful button (and entered the all-powerful administrator password, mind you), it would install and subsequently change the DNS servers on your Mac. The newly-installed malicious happy camper on your Mac would then hijack your web requests and redirect you to spurious phishing websites. [See? Pornography is destroying our society! -DM]

As hyped as it was, the Trojan horse was noticed early, so it didn’t actually gain any traction in the Mac community, mostly fading away after its first appearance. If, however, you use the “private browsing” feature of Safari a lot and want to be sure that your Mac isn’t infected by nasty Trojan horses, you can head over to SecureMac’s website and download their newly released and free DNSChanger Removal Tool (warning: direct download link), which will scan your Mac for the Trojan horse, remove it if found, and restore your DNS settings.

A big thank you from MacUser to SecureMac for taking the effort to do a noble deed. To people who find that they are infected with the trojan (though we hope that no one does), we highly recommend that you check out Rob Griffith’s wise words at the mothership so that you can stay clear of these nasty little messengers of satan in future.


1 Comments

goobimama Author Profile Page said:

I refuse to accept something that requires an administrator username and password as a threat. This one is nothing like pluggin in a pen drive and have your computer go down within the day...

Of course, virus writers should not take this as a challenge and do write one of those...

January 5, 2008 3:47 AM

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