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First Mac OS X virus

It’s stories like this (well, really a link within a link in the story) which really makes me wish a paid more attention in my assembler class…they post the disassembly, but I don’t remember what most of it means on x86, let alone ppc…

Basically, someone wrote a unix executable and got it to appear to OS X as a jpg image, when people double-clicked it, it ran and did some not-nice things. Didn’t look to be terribly malicious, but it propogated through IM somehow, and was starting to spread. So watch out!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 16th, 2006 at 08:41 and is filed under Programming, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Comment

  • Wyatt Neal says:
    Thu February 16, 2006 at 17:00

    I don’t know what I find funnier … the fact that people think this is the first Mac virus or 95% of the inane babblings on the forum where this is posted.

    Following up with the actual disassemble of the program, this is what the guy said it did:
    – It doesn’t actually do anything other than attempt to propagate itself via iChat
    – It has a bug in the code that prevents it from working as intended, which has the side-effect of preventing infected applications from launching
    – It’s not particularly sophisticated

    After actually taking a look at the assembler and then being unable to find out how it was actually attaching to other applications (which I found out is not in the part that is online) I actually understand some of it. From my meager view, I can see where some of the execution as well as directory searching/making occur. Still funny though to watch all the Mac users scramble over each to get to the flame war :-) .

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