January 27th, 2009

Posted by David Morgenstern

With the arrival of yet another trojan targeting the Mac, antispyware vendor MacScan on Tuesday updated and renamed its trojan removal tool.

The previous version was called the iWorkServices Trojan Removal Tool, and SecureMac changed the program’s name to the iServices Trojan Removal Tool.  The company said the updated tool is also a free download and detects and removes the new variant trojan found on pirated versions of Adobe Photoshop CS 4 for Mac OS X.

This trojan is working its way around various P2P networks and with various packages as the vector for infections. The first version was discovered in copies of iWork 09, which was introduced at Macworld Expo earlier this month.

According to MacScan:

Like its predecessor, variant B obtains root privileges, and notifies the remote host of the infected computer’s location on the Internet. It is recommended users avoid downloading pirated copies of these programs. What’s more, it is anticipated that new variants will be discovered in the coming months in other software cialis weekend pill packages distributed by third parties over the Internet.

January 26th, 2009

Posted by Adam O'Donnell

Two Mac trojan outbreaks were spotted in the past week leaving several people, including myself, to wonder if the tipping point for the Mac malware epidemic has arrived. Frankly, I don’t know, but I tend not to think so. I do think, however, that Mac malware will now become endemic amongst the high-risk groups such as file-swappers.

This past week a trojan claiming to be the latest iWork release was spotted on file sharing networks. Shortly thereafter, a similar trojan was sighted that masquerading as a crack for Photoshop CS4. Both events are making some people question whether or not the Mac’s long tenure as being a malware-free system is coming to a close and to face facts and install AV software.

The short answer is if you are a relatively well-behaved computer user, probably not. Mac malware is not endemic amongst the general population due to these events. The trojans of the past week is not self-propagating beyond the high-risk population, namely file swappers, and is relatively easy to find, analyze, and remediate. This is in stark contrast to PC users who have been hit with the Downadup/Conficker worm, which propagates via three orthogonal vectors and includes one remote exploit, and actively prevents you from visiting websites that contain remediation tools.

I do think cialis vs generic cialis the relative halcyon days of malware-free Macs are coming to an end. Anyone who is currently infected by the new malware will remain infected without direct human interaction due to the lack of any automatic mechanism for the identification and removal of malware. That means there is a non-zero population of Mac users who are now compromised and will remain compromised unless they either clean their machine or they buy a new system. Sounds familiar, right?

The question I want answered is whether or not the monetization rate of compromised Macs is sufficient for the malware authors to continue to pursue the platform. If not, these events will be a blip on the radar; otherwise, Mac owners better keep their Time Machine backups up to date.

January 24th, 2009

Posted by Richard Koman

Could the federal government be going open source? The BBC reports that President Obama has asked former Sun CEO Scott McNealy to report on the relative benefits of open source software. Imagine that: a president who has heard of open source software.

And McNealy will report just how large those benefits are.

It’s intuitively obvious open source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software. Open source does not require you to pay a penny to Microsoft or IBM or Oracle or any proprietary vendor any money.

And he wants open source mandates.

The government ought to mandate open source products based on open source reference implementations to improve security, get higher quality software, lower costs, higher reliability – all the benefits that come with open software.

Coming from McNealy, the opinion is hardly a neutral analysis. Sun is a vigorous proposal of open source and Unix; cofounder Bill Joy was a primary author of BSD. During his tenure as CEO, McNealy’s hallmark was his constant attacks on Microsoft and Bill Gates.

In his inaugural speech, Obama said:

those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

The question is how much longer spending huge amounts of taxpayer money on proprietary solutions can be justified as “spending wisely” or something other than a “bad habit.”

Michael Tiemann, VP of RedHat and head of the Open Source Initiative, estimated the global waste in using proprietary software at more than $1 trillion annually.

This is the kind of change we need if we are ever going to see the government reform its operational capabilities and cost basis. If they fail to do this, it’s one more stick in the mud. The capital markets are telling us today we can no longer afford much more status quo.

At TruthOut, Dean Baker has called for a $2 billion investment to further development of open source for the desktop.

This money can be used to further develop and simplify open source operating systems such as Linux, as well other forms of free software. The payoffs from this spending would be enormous. Imagine that every computer buyer in the world would be able to get a computer for which the operating system was free, as was almost all the software that they would ever use.

This would surely save consumers an average of at least $200 per computer. With sales at close to 20 million a year, cialis usa the savings in the United States alone could easily exceed the cost of supporting software development. Adding in the benefits (and presumably some contributions) from the rest of the world, we will be way ahead by going the route of publicly funded open software.

I think Baker probably misses the ball on this one. I fully support expanded government funding of open source developments. But the real benefit is not in demolishing Microsoft’s market for Windows but in developing more and more robust database, cloud and distributed computing solutions. Cost savings for government and business would free up money to invest in R&D, expand into new markets and increase hiring.