Digital Undercurrents

Apple is planning to release an update in the near future specifically to deal with the MacDefender malware that’s been making the rounds for the last couple of weeks. There’s blood in the water now, though – I wouldn’t be surprised to see significant amounts of new malware on OS X in the near future, now that it’s a proven target.

Macintosh users – welcome to the fake antivirus party.

A new piece of malware called “Macdefender” has been seen in the wild. It is a Javascript installation inside of a compressed ZIP folder, which means that users running as administrators with “Open Safe Files After Download” checked in Safari will launch and install it automatically. Some users are reporting that they were not even prompted for a confirmation password on the installation.

Are the days of individual computer security behind us? The president of the Australian Internet Industry Association seems to think so.

While security was once implemented on a per-machine basis, new threats require countermeasures at the network and protocol levels. Nowhere is this more obvious than in hosted applications and other SaaS implementations. Man-in-the-middle attacks, session hijacks, even attacks against “cloud” providers are all beyond the capabilities of an individual user to handle.

Brave new world.

The Pentagon Federal Credit Union, the third-largest Credit Union in America, has suffered a security breach exposing the personal data of an unknown number of members. Their explanation is malware brought in on an infected laptop.

There was a time when you could depend on a firewall to protect your network, when data and work would stay in one place and something like this couldn’t happen. There was also a time when a city had a huge wall around it, with one or two gates. Now people have locks on their individual houses, but apparently, the computing world hasn’t caught up yet.

The Internet Crime Complaint Center has a cautionary tale for prospective employers. An email attachment on a response to an online job posting was actually a Trojan Horse program, used to steal the financial credentials of the hiring company and defraud them of over a hundred thousand dollars.

It might be wise to have a dedicated machine or VM for handling untrusted attachments like that; at the very least, make sure that your antivirus software is up-to-date and use it to explicitly scan unknown attachments before opening.