Well done to Sophos, an anti-virus company (to simplify things a bit). Apparently there’s a new round of malware floating around out there that can infect your Mac. Observe!
The nasty in question, OSX/Tored-Fam, is a worm. It will burn your house down if given the chance.
So now you have a few choices, Mac users: you can steer clear of Flash-based porn sites, avoiding this whole nonsense altogether; you can buy whatver Sophos is selling; or you can smarten up and not click on OK every time something says, “Oh, hey you need to download this or we’re steal your puppy.”
No one will steal your puppy.
After reading the blogs about the virus at the Sophos website, as well as how it can spread, this doesn’t appear to have anything to do with Flash at all. In fact, the word “Flash” never appears in the blog about it.
http://bit.ly/tO8uo
This is an OSX problem, related to users that agree to install an ActiveX object for install.
Please make the correction, or post exactly where Sophos says this is related to Flash, so that Flash developers can deal with it properly, and/or Mac users can be correctly informed of the dangers related to this, and other, OSX viruses.
Yeah, I agree. Flash gets trashed enough as it is. C’mon, even Dave sort of apologized to Palin. And while looking into that, maybe change that hasty “we’re steal your puppy” line to [1] We’re still your puppy, [2] We’re Steal, your puppy, or, [3] We’ll steal your puppy, or a variant thereof.
What will Apple do now that the only reason to buy a Mac is so people can see it at Starbucks?
lol there’s still no reason to buy anything windows based, unless you enjoy aggravation.
I wouldn’t say that’s true. I play EQ2 when I get the chance, and I use Enterprise Architect. They are not available on the Mac. I’m sure there’s tons of other examples though.
Would I ever buy another Windows machine though…no. You can build one on the cheap, and for laptops, I’d either BootCamp or VMWare/Parallels/Whatever the Open Source one is.
As a developer though, you have to be able to test on Windows. The EC2 gives me everything I need for that though.
It’s absolutely true. Why do you think I own a Mac, got out of microsoft and invested in apple. You need to recognize a sinking ship when you see it.
Funny, all Macs ever go is cause aggravation for me. My Windows systems run fine.
I’m sure they do run fine if you don’t do anything useful with them.
If you are dumb enough to install an ActiveX control on a Mac, this is your penance. :-P
Really, though, I don’t even install anti-virus on Windows machines. As long as you keep the updates reasonably current and don’t download anything stupid, the hassle of running AV isn’t worth it.
As a matter of fact, my first Windows machine came with AV (well, the motherboard did). Whenever I’d try to work in my legit copy of 3ds max while it was installed, the whole thing would crash. Good thing I was protected. o_0
“If you are dumb enough to install an ActiveX control on a Mac, this is your penance. :-P”
They are Apple fans, how smart can they be?
“Really, though, I don’t even install anti-virus on Windows machines. As long as you keep the updates reasonably current and don’t download anything stupid, the hassle of running AV isn’t worth it.”
INCREDIBLY stupid thing to do, this is like a trapeze artist working without a safety net. Yeah, he may be a professional, but hes only human and can make mistakes, and there is no telling if the equipment might even break (viruses that can hot you with no human interaction needed).
Considering that there are several free and GOOD virus scanners out there that are near invisible to the user and cause less than 1-3% impact on system resources, I see zero reason not to use one.
Okay, I get it that not all of you can afford a mac, but really, enough with all of the mac bashing. There is nothing a pc can do that my mac can not. I guess all you pc fanboys like having machines that are buggy and an os that is even worse.
that’s why I got a windows, so I wouldn’t have to worry about this sort of thing.. ha ha suckas…
mac or pc they are just tools .Who cares if you like mac or pc just use what you are comfortable with and just shut the hell up.Microsoft and Apple are just both corporate beasts who are laughing all the way to the bank while you idiots war with each other over if mac or pc is better.