Mac Botnets Doesn't Mean an Increased Threat -- Yet
Writing in the latest issue of Virus Bulletin (registration required), two Symantec researchers report what they believe is the first evidence of a major botnet consisting of compromised Macs. However other experts aren't so sure of the increased threat to Mac users.
Researchers Mario Ballano Barcena and Alfredo Pesoli found that Mac users who downloaded pirated copies of iWork 09 and Adobe Creative Suite 4 from P2P sites got more than the programs they intended. Added to the binaries were two malware variants--OSX.Iservice and OSX.Iservice.B. The malware executes a PHP script, running as root, that launches distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against sites. One site, dollarcardmarketing.com, reported a DDoS attack of more than 600Gb of Web traffic at its peak, according to the Washington Post.
While Apple has been successful with advertising that Mac users won't suffer the same number of viral attacks that Windows users endure, "unfortunately Macs offer no protection against the manipulation of emotions by malicious users," said Randy Abrams, director of education at ESET, an antivirus vendor.
