[PLUG-TALK] MacOS & Android Malware

[Russell Johnson]

On Apr 19, 2012, at 9:02 AM, Rich Shepard wrote:

>   According to an article in today's 'Oregonian', the prevalence of devices
> running macOS and android has attracted the malware writers. If macos is
> vulnerable, wouldn't linux also be vulnerable? And, given the BSD paternity
> of macos, how vulnerable is it? (Web browser entry excepted because that's
> OS-indendent ... yes?)

It's been going around the news agencies for the past week or so. Supposedly, some 800,000 OS/X devices are infected with some malware. Of course, the source reporting these infections is an anti-malware company in Russia. At the same time, there are a couple of methods given to verify if you are infected or not. One of them is a simple shell command checking for a specific key in the plist data. 

While they are not immune to compromise, all OSes have some vulnerability and you must take this into account. OS/X is just becoming more of a target because it's gaining market share. It's still less than 10%. Linux is less than 1% according to the reports I've read.

Russell Johnson
russ at dimstar.net