Comments on: How to protect your Mac OS X from first ever Mac OS X Botnet

By: Zan

Zan — Fri, 22 May 2009 02:05:52 +0000

The first part of the so-called “bot-net” symptoms was due to DNS cache poisoning. You can check against your ISP’s DNS servers by opening up Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal) and typing the following:
cat /etc/hosts
This is mainly evident in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, but not 10.5 Leopard; as Leopard lists any and all DNS servers in System Preferences -> Network -> [Network Service] -> DNS, whereas you can hide certain DNS servers from Tiger.

@dude (and whomever else this concerns),
Macs are kind of a different breed, where when systems are compromised, it is usually because the user was tricked into entering their password, or because the user was doing something out of a typical moral scope (i.e. downloading commercial software from P2P sites, etc).

Windows users (please notice I don’t use the term “PC” to describe Windows) can be subject to the same thing or by the same methods, except most Windows systems out there still practice old and insecure policies; and/or people are too lazy to keep their systems updated and well protected. Windows, by default, has exponentially more security flaws than any other modern day operating system. It’s not that Mac users are snooty. It’s that they are so grateful not to have to fight their operating system, or have to know a Windows genius to configure their system properly.

In any case, both parties are generally ill-informed about modern day computing and the basic concepts of how the internet works. Case-in-point, the author of this article Salman Ul Haq seems to think that 90-100% of processor usage equates a possible virus infection. How are people like this posing as viable authorities to the general computing public?

The internet: Taken with a grain of salt.

@Edward,
The whole “Just works” thing is really old. Lern2troll better.

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Parlay: Return Saberi and more « Phil the Pill — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 22:01:27 +0000

[...] what’s this about a MacOSX Botnet? How do I protect my hyper-expensive computer from [...]

By: Edward

Edward — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 21:02:23 +0000

@echovox

What about the beret-wearing, gullible techtarded people who were ‘advertised’ into buying a mac?

By: Mark

Mark — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 20:46:00 +0000

@echovox
Seems unlikely to me that “grandma” pirated Photoshop or iWork. This new-breed of Mac user is likely the young college student who got their first Mac, and is “tech savvy” is the sense of having developed Facebook and torrent skilz.

By: Jes

Jes — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 20:10:58 +0000

The simplest prevention:

Don’t install a bootleg copy of iWorks and Photoshop CS

iWorks in $79, and there are substitutes that free anyway if that’s too expensive.

Photoshop ain’t cheap but there is Gimp :-p

Just a thought

By: clayton

clayton — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 19:44:26 +0000

Surely, some gay guys got themselves, told.

By: Brian

Brian — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 18:33:59 +0000

@George: While I agree that downloading illegal software as well as intravenous drug use can both lead to viral infections, I don’t think you need to rag on drug users to get your point across. Unless you’ve never touched a beer or a cigarette, you’re no better than any drug user, just probably better off.

If people who are intravenous drug users weren’t stigmatized by society, they wouldn’t feel the need to use dirty needles in disgusting crack shacks, and therefore reduce their likelihood of getting a transmittable disease/infection from said intravenous drug use.

By: echovox

echovox — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 18:02:53 +0000

@dude
Unfortunately, there are two breeds of Mac user: the beret-wearing, tech-savvy, “I use a Mac because it’s a superior platform” user; and the six-cat-owning, gray-hair-having, “I use a Mac because it’s easy to use and matches my end table” user. While the former group is most certainly going to catch on quickly that their machines are infected, having installed a Dashboard CPU monitor or a network graph menu item, the latter group is likely to never notice their machine being gradually stolen away from them by increasing loads of malware.

Surprise–this is the same dichotomy that exists on the Windows side as well. We Mac users are just more smug about it.

By: dude

dude — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 17:30:17 +0000

Lol nice troll ‘you fags’. Unfortunately for you you’re way off the mark. No one sane ever said mac’s are perfect or immune in any way from malware attacks like this.

What we _do_ say is that while 20k mac might be infected with this thing, mac users are coherent enough and pay enough attention to fix it while windows machines go on for years as zombies.

Also, even if macs were somehow immune from security threats, that would be the reason to use them. The reason is that windows _blows_ and using _anything_ else is like a breath of fresh air.

By: Edward

Edward — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 17:15:55 +0000

Apple Mac – Just works.

“If your CPU is showing excessive usage (90 to 100% at times) then that’s a strong sign that your Mac has been infected.”

You should mention that you mean when you aren’t doing anything because if you’re doing something like encoding a video of course your processor will be maxing out. Oh wait, facebook wouldn’t do that.