Macbook pro with trojan

P

Peder

Hobbit
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I got my first mac computer with a Trojan was a rather interesting experience, never thought i would come across it but man that mac was sick, really it had porn sites galore!!!

At least as far as i see it was painlessly removed.

Just thought I'd share this info with you guys :)
 
macxsanity said:
Lol ... looks like apple will be full of BS like M$ really soon
Click to expand...

well with market share comes more and more problems...

i read this article on the weekend and suddenly on sunday someone comes up to me saying my computer is acting strangely and keeps telling me I need antivirus and it opens all kinds of porn sites randomly...

but yeah its scary to think that mac territory is also getting infected...
 
Strange, I've never experienced anything like that. Can you give some details?

What version of OS X are you running?
 
It kept giving growl notifications that the antivirus is out of date and then it would incessantly pop up strange sites which was quite disturbing. I noticed the program that was running was called macshield, though once i removed macshield everything seemed back to normal, i also updated the system, was about 1.2Gb

It was osx snow leopard, it had been updated quite a while ago so that is one problem
 
OK. Have you tried ClamXav?

The Macshield site claims that it only supports Leopard and earlier
 
BobJones said:
OK. Have you tried ClamXav?

The Macshield site claims that it only supports Leopard and earlier
Click to expand...
i must admit i haven't tried clamxav but i will check today what that mac does then we can see if just deleting macshield works or if i need to install clamxav.

i think this program(macshield) was a virus in itself it must have gotten installed accidentally or something like that as that zdnet post says above, once i deleted macshield all was well again...

I also know for a fact that the ladies whose mac it is wouldn't put antivirus on her mac so it must have been installed through the background...
 
Last edited:
I'm not trying to be combative or "fanboyish", but it is very rare to get a mac virus infected.

Viruses don't just "get installed in the background", at least not if you run a standard user account and not as admin.

Also if you disable "open safe files" in Safari, you can only really get infected if you are tricked into installing the virus yourself, eg the infected pirated version of photoshop a couple of years ago.

What I'm trying to understand is if this particular report is of a real virus threat, or a something else... Like one porn site visit too many spawning bad behaviour in Safari pop-up blocking?
 
FWIW, 5 years with Mac OSX, and owning 2 iMacs and 2 MacBook Pro's....I have never seen a virus on any of my machines......and I am constantly trawling the internet. (I don't trawl the porn sites - maybe that helps)

Where there is smoke there is usually fire ?
 
BobJones said:
I'm not trying to be combative or "fanboyish", but it is very rare to get a mac virus infected.

Viruses don't just "get installed in the background", at least not if you run a standard user account and not as admin.

Also if you disable "open safe files" in Safari, you can only really get infected if you are tricked into installing the virus yourself, eg the infected pirated version of photoshop a couple of years ago.

What I'm trying to understand is if this particular report is of a real virus threat, or a something else... Like one porn site visit too many spawning bad behaviour in Safari pop-up blocking?
Click to expand...

it was malware not a virus...

and i have no idea how this happened, as was said in the zdnet tech blog there is a possibility that the code got picked up while opening a site, maybe even inadvertently...
 
OK... I was thrown by your reference to 'macshield'.

There are a lot of differing views on how to try and prevent picking up these malware and viruses in general, but two things that are generally commonly mentioned are:
1- Don't run as administrator
2- Disable 'open safe files' in Safari

One thing in common to basically all mac 'virus' is that if you are in the small minority that ever gets infected, removal is trivial.
 
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