by ·0 Comments

Seems like the digital fortress that is OS X is finally starting to crack. Andrew over at the Ambrosia Software Web Board writes about what he sees as a Trojan for OS X which was postet at the MacRumors.com website.

It’s a little compressed file pretending to include screenshots of the next OS X version. When decompressed it appears to include a JPG file which in reality is a UNIX executable that performs several malicious functions.
From what he found out the Trojan tries to send itself via iChat to all your buddies, there is also code that tries to spread the Trojan via eMail but it looks like it’s not entirely finished.

Read more about the dissection in the original thread » here. Included is also a disassembled version (textfile) of the Trojan.

Here is the thread at MacRumors.com (link to the original file deleted).

So maybe it’s time for us Mac users to start running a virus scanner in the background while working?

Update: robg of macosxhints.com examined the Trojan a little further for Macworld at Digging deeper into the Leap-A malware. His resum??is the following:

I am now officially very sick of Leap-A, having spent probably 18 hours on it over the last two days. The short summary is that it’s a bad piece of malware that could have been worse but it’s far from the self-propagating internet-spreading virus/worm that’s been described on other sites. At the end of the day, it’s really just a good reminder to be very careful about what you download and install on your Mac.

by ·1 Comment

I thought I’d post a little howto on how I try to keep the data on the hard drive of my little iBook save. So without further ado… here it is:

  1. This steps actually involves leaving your beloved home. Beware it might be very bright and sunny outside! What you are after is an external hard drive of similar or preferably greater size than your internal HD. In my case I bought a 250GB drive savely kept in an external case which has one USB 2.0 & two FireWire ports. FireWire was particularly important for me, because of the Mac’s capability to boot from FireWire drives but more on that later.
  2. hds.pngNext I partitioned the hard drive (using HFS+ for maximum compatibility under OS X) with one partition serving as the mirror for my internal 60GB disk. The rest of the disk is used as backup space for other data, right now we’ll only care about the mirror drive.
  3. My main goal was to get a fully functional clone of my internal disk, so in the event of a disaster, if my drive crashed I could just plug in the external mirror, boot it and work on as usual. After a little bit of searching, the best tool I found for cloning disks on the Mac is CarbonCopyCloner. So I made a clone of my internal disk to the mirror partition checking the “Make bootable” option in CCC’s preferences.
  4. After the clone operation finished I tested the mirror by choosing System Preferences it as the startup disk in Mac OS X’s System Preferences and restarting the OS. It started up perfectly and I had the exact same system in front of me, except for the fact that it was running off the external FireWire drive and the internal disk was completely powered down.
  5. Now that I had my working mirror savely stored at home in case of disasters, I only needed a solution to keep it up to date. Synchronize! X Pro Again Google was my friend and after a few searches I came up with Synchonize! Pro X which has loads of options for possibly every synching need you might have or develop in the future. At the moment I’m just using the “Bootable System Backup” option to synch my internal disk with the external one.
  6. Never forget to test your backups! About every second or third sync I invest a few minutes of my valuable time to restart my iBook from the external drive to make sure the backup disk is working as desired.

I know it might not be perfect to do this just “whenever I think of it” (which is currently about twice a week) but it is still far more effective than my previous non-backup strategy which I kept running for over one year. Especially considered that I’m using my iBook on the road (at uni, at work etc.), always carriyng it around in my backpack which exposes it to the high risk of being damaged easily. With my current solutin my data is safe and I could even go to any arbitrary Mac, plug in the external drive, reboot and have my usual working environment running on the system.

edit: I know I could have maybe used Synchronize! X Pro for the entire progress of cloning and synching my hard drive. The reason I chose the detour over CCC was that I initially wanted to choose this programm for the synching as well but encountered that it was painfully slow and not as easy a one-click-solution as Synchronize! X Pro.

by ·0 Comments

Infocon YELLOW The SANS Internet Storm Center has raised it’s global Infocon status to yellow due to a recent Exploit targeting a specific DLL on Microsoft Windows Operating Systems. The Explotit, for which there is no official Patch at the moment, allows attackers to execute any kind of code via just by viewing an Image. That means you do not need to open an Image sent to you by mail the malicous code will execute immediately.

  • Why is this issue so important? The WMF vulnerability uses images (WMF images) to execute arbitrary code. It will execute just by viewing the image. In most cases, you don’t have click anything. Even images stored on your system may cause the exploit to be triggered if it is indexed by some indexing software. Viewing a directory in Explorer with ‘Icon size’ images will cause the exploit to be triggered as well.
  • Is it better to use Firefox or Internet Explorer? Internet Explorer will view the image and trigger the exploit without warning. New versions of Firefox will prompt you before opening the image. However, in most environments this offers little protection given that these are images and are thus considered ‘safe’.
  • What versions of Windows are affected? All. Windows 2000, Windows XP, (SP1 and SP2), Windows 2003. All are affected to some extent. Mac OS X, Unix or BSD is not affected. Note: If you’re still running on Win98/ME, this is a watershed moment: we believe (untested) that your system is vulnerable and there will be no patch from MS. Your mitigation options are very limited. You really need to upgrade.
  • What can I do to protect myself?
    1. Microsoft has not yet released a patch. An unofficial patch was made available by Ilfak Guilfanov. The reviewed and tested version is available here (now at v1.3, MD5: 14d8c937d97572deb9cb07297a87e62a), PGP signature (signed with ISC key) here. THANKS to Ilfak Guilfanov for providing the patch!!
    2. You can unregister the related DLL.
    3. Virus checkers provide some protection.

    To unregister the DLL:

    • Click Start, click Run, type “regsvr32 -u %windir%\system32\shimgvw.dll” (without the quotation marks), and then click OK.
    • A dialog box appears to confirm that the un-registration process has succeeded. Click OK to close the dialog box.

It is generally considered best practice to unregister the DLL and install the Patch.

For the most up-to-date information and current Patch versions, refer to the WMF FAQ.