- MARKMYWORDS REDDIT YES OR NO FOR MAC
- MARKMYWORDS REDDIT YES OR NO SOFTWARE
- MARKMYWORDS REDDIT YES OR NO FREE
- MARKMYWORDS REDDIT YES OR NO MAC
MARKMYWORDS REDDIT YES OR NO MAC
And no it isn't Mac but understand that MacOSX is based on BSD and NeXT, both of which are Unix derivatives. I know because I maintain servers (mail included).
There is a reason mail servers (example) use antivirus software. I'll point two things out in increasing order of significance:ġ. You're falling for a dangerous fallacy then, sudon't. Maybe I should have got onto the Reddit part of the story earlier in the piece, but I felt the Mac malware part was probably the thing which would concern potential victims the most. Of course, over the years we've seen Twitter used for botnet c&C on many occasions (here's an early example: ) but many folks may be unaware that sometimes Reddit can be unwittingly called into action to help the bad guys too. and, secondly, the use of Reddit for botnet command-and-control purposes. What I wanted to get across in the story were two interesting aspects: firstly, new and apparently widespread Mac malware. Maybe my headline was sloppily worded – I'm not sure it was, but I'm open to criticism on that, and would be happy to hear suggestions from others on how I could better phrase it. I'd much rather you told me you were disgruntled than left for some other corner of the internet and never darkened the doorstep of GCHQ again. Thanks for the feedback Scott, and I appreciate you leaving a comment. If other vendors have similar deals, please leave a comment below so Mac users can check it out.įound this article interesting? Follow Graham Cluley on Twitter to read more of the exclusive content we post. The Bitdefender offer runs out at midnight on Monday Wednesday night. Clearly a few different versions of the attack have already been seen, and users would be wise to keep their Mac anti-virus products updated as it wouldn’t be a surprise if there were more to come.
MARKMYWORDS REDDIT YES OR NO FOR MAC
You can check it out here.īitdefender tells me that Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac detects the malware as, ,, and.
MARKMYWORDS REDDIT YES OR NO FREE
Update: The guys at Bitdefender have been in touch, offering readers of Graham Cluley Security News, a special deal whereby you can get six months’ free protection with their Mac anti-virus product. More information about this particular threat can be found on Dr Web’s website.
MARKMYWORDS REDDIT YES OR NO SOFTWARE
In addition, keep your computer patched with the latest security updates – both for the underlying OS X operating system, but also for commonly targeted software such as Adobe Reader, Flash and Java. An anti-virus product should be part of your arsenal, if you value your privacy and the data you store on your Apple computer. This isn’t, of course, the first time that we have seen Mac computers infected by malware and hijacked into a criminal botnet, and it isn’t anything like as big so far as the notorious Flashback worm which hit more than 600,000 Mac computers in early 2012.īut it is another timely warning that Mac users shouldn’t be fooled into thinking they are somehow immune from computer security threats. They’ve done nothing wrong as such, and even if they shut down the accounts that are communicating with the botnet there would be nothing to stop the hackers behind the campaign creating new accounts or using an alternative service (Twitter, perhaps?) to communicate with the compromised computers.Īnd it’s important to stress that Reddit isn’t spreading the infection – it’s simply providing a platform that is helping the botmasters communicate with the Mac computers they have managed to infect.ĭr Web’s research team claim that the country hit hardest by the botnet is the United States, followed by Canada and the United Kingdom. This isn’t really Reddit’s fault of course.
The search returns a web page containing a list of botnet C&C servers and ports published by criminals in comments to the post minecraftserverlists under the account vtnhiaovyd. It is worth mentioning that in order to acquire a control server address list, the bot uses the search service at, and - as a search query - specifies hexadecimal values of the first 8 bytes of the MD5 hash of the current date. It sends a request to a remote site to acquire a list of control servers, and then connects to the remote servers and waits for instructions. Then opens a port on an infected computer and awaits an incoming connection. Fascinatingly, compromised computers receive commands from servers under the control of botmasters, using information posted in messages on Reddit as a navigational aid: