Worm for Mac is a funny, little joke

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» 07 May 2009

Worm for Mac is a funny, little joke

A worm intended to attack Macintosh machines has failed immensely.

Its virus engineer probably thought he could create a botnet on Mac machines. Tough luck.

The worm moves around through e-mail. This is a fairly novel approach as most malware used to infect Macs usually pose as video codecs, pirated software, and such. The good news to everyone is that the worm is brimming with bugs and mistakes that it is actually funny and sad to look at. Mac users will not find this worm a problem at all.

There are very few malware designed for Macs compared to the almost millions of viruses, trojans, and other malware designed for Windows-based computers. These types of malware are typically sent to a victim's computer through multimedia websites, download websites or peer-to-peer (P2P) networks used by these hackers.

The Internet security firm Sophos explained how Tored works. It spreads itself through e-mail and e-mail attachments. After infection, it gathers e-mail addresses from these Mac computers before spreading copies of itself to the collected e-mails. Made in Tunisia, Tored's creator aspired for it to be the "first Mac OS X botnet agent", according to comments found on the virus code. Sadly, because of too many spelling and grammar mistakes on the e-mails it sends, it turns out to be as unconvincing as it is harmless.

Two Trojans were discovered last January and published on April were named OSX.Trojan.iServices.A and OSX.Trojan.iServices.B. According to Intego, a Mac anti-virus provider, these two are more suited to be called "first Mac OS X Botnet" as they are far more potent than Tored in how they are spread and hidden.

We shouldn't need to worry about this worm according to the senior technology consultant of Sophos, Graham Cluley, since the worm has so many bugs that the chances of actually getting infected with a working copy of it is slim.

A funny note is left by the author/s of this worm for Windows, Linux, Unix and other non-OS X users:

For Mac OS X ! :(If you are not on Mac please transfer this mail to a Mac and sorry for our fault :)

The superworm "Conficker" which alarmed Mac security firms in the recent days overshadowed this incident as specialists became more concerned with it. They thought this superworm would be a greater threat to Mac users as Mac OS X variants of this worm would most probably appear. Fortunately, Intego's virus engineers are looking into this issue 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week.