“Hackers have launched a rare and troubling attack on Apple Inc.’s computers,” Ben Charny reports for The Wall Street Journal in an article bearing and blaring the headline, “In Rare Attack, Virus Targets Macs.”
MacDailyNews Take: Fools.
“Apple on Thursday confirmed reports of pornography Web sites where hidden software, once downloaded, could take control of an Apple computer. Apple did not immediately respond to claims that it is the first instance of a Trojan horse attack on Apple’s Macintosh platform,” Charny reports.
“After confirming the claims reported by computer-security firm Intego, Symantec engineer Joji Hamada wrote on Symantec’s Web site of suspicions that a wave of attacks and viruses are due. ‘If we see a rise in Mac malware, then we will have to assume that there are profits to be made in malware for Macs as well,’ he wrote,” Charny reports.
MacDailyNews Take: Profits for whom, Symantec?
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "MadMac" for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: Trojan horses have been around for Macs forever. They’re not that rare, not very troubling to anyone with at least half a brain, and they’re not “viruses.” The Wall Street Journal blew this one thoroughly in the headline and Charny blew it in the article (which at least reported it correctly as a trojan, not a virus).
As usual, there are three factions at work: (1) Anti-this/Anti-software peddlers, (2) entities looking to stem the tide of Windows to Mac defectors, and (3) the painfully ignorant. Sometimes they originate from separate and distinct camps and other times they occupy two or all three groups at once. You decide from under which rock(s) Charny, his quotees, and the WSJ headliner writer crawled.
Furthermore, if The Wall Street Journal ran articles about every Windows trojan, the world would have run out of trees years ago.
One thing seems routine: Macs show increased sales and/or gain market share and the ill-informed anti-Apple/anti-Mac headlines and articles suddenly spring up. It isn’t magic, or by chance, or pretty; it has a purpose: to keep the Windows sufferers on the reservation and/or to sell useless, processor-cycle-robbing software.
Here’s an excellent example of what happens when an outlet like The Wall Street Journal blows it: It gets repeated and magnified a thousand times over.
This is not the first Mac trojan, nor will it be the last. As always: Do not enter your Mac OS X admin password to install anything from an unknown and/or untrusted source.
Contacts:
The Wall Street Journal:
Ben Charny:
[UPDATE: 1:25pm EDT: WSJ has changed the headline to "In Rare Attack, Malware Targets Macs."]
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