More Mac Malware In The Wild!

While still low-intensity compared to the PC platform, malware attacks against Macs are definitely becoming more prevalent. Trend Micro researcher Ivan Macalintal has found another new variant of the JAHLAV family hosted on known malicious domains. The new variant is detected as OSX_JAHLAV.I and, like other JAHLAV variants, poses as pirated versions of legitimate applications and modifies the system’s DNS settings, allowing malicious users to be victimized by phishing attacks, or surreptitiously redirecting them to sites which might harbor malicious exploits.

Unlike the earlier variants which only posed as versions of QuickTime, this one also poses as pirated versions of Foxit Reader and several antivirus applications. In addition, like the June variant of JAHLAV—OSX_JAHLAV.B—at least one website hosting OSX_JAHLAV.I could also deliver malware onto Windows systems, although the said file is no longer available from the said website.

This is bad news as it seems that lately there have been more and more attacks on the Mac community. Macs are known to not really have many types of security threats that they need to watch out for allowing a good number of users to not even worry about having antivirus software installed. If Mac users are not careful they are going to be easy targets for some of these new threats if they continue to browse around with their care free attitude.

So even for all you Mac users out there, you are not completely safe from the dangers on the internet. There are guys out there trying to compormise your system to use it for very bad things so if you do not have antivirus software installed I would highly suggest that you look into it. Even if you do not want to buy any software for this there are tons of free versions out there as well so there is really no excuse.