Monday, 23. June 2008
Trojan Horse Affecting MAC OS Exposed
Mac-centric security firms SecureMac, and Intego last week reported that they have discovered a Trojan horse that can affect MAC OS X versions 10.4 and 10.5, commercially known as Tiger and Leopard respectively.
The malicious code is being distributed from a hacker Web site, where there have been discussions on distributing the Trojan through iChat and LimeWire, said SecureMac, which has given the Trojan a critical security rating. The Trojan horse takes benefit of a security bug of the Apple Remote Desktop Agent (ARDAgent), and allows a hacker to do send whatever commands he likes to your Mac.
Among the things that a malicious user can do are taking pictures with Mac’s built-in camera, Apple iSight, erase all your files, change passwords and even program the system to perform a set of commands periodically. The Trojan is distributed as AppleScript called Asthtv05, 60KB in size, or as an application bundle called Astht_v06, 3.1 MB in size. The filed must be downloaded and opened in order to infect a machine.
Enabling Remote Desktop, completely disabling ARDAgent, or removing ARDAgent from its default location and achieving it, can protect Mac systems against this Trojan horse.