Trojan Hits Macs Through Pirated Software

      by Wyatt Walter

Appleinsider reports that tens of thousands of Mac users have been infected with a trojan horse when installing pirated software. A hacked copy of Apple iWork ’09 and Adobe CS4 have been floating around through bit torrents and P2P softwares that installs some extra software that checks in with a server which then allows the attacker to run commands on the user’s computer. So far the trojan is only being reported as being sent through those two applications, though it would be easy to place the trojan into any pirated application circling the web.

The differences between the official version and infected, pirated version of iWork is the inclusion of a package called iWorkServices.pkg in the pirated version which then runs at startup as (I’m assuming) the root user (since the user had to put in a password for sudo to install). The CS4 trojan uses malicious code in the cracking utility used to disable the licensing features of CS4 which also installs itself as a startup item with a root backdoor.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Jan 27th, 2009